Web-Based Database System for Soil, Water, and Forage Testing Information Management

In this thesis, a web-based database system is created for the Soil Water, and Forage Analysis Laboratory at Oklahoma State University to manage test results of over 30,000 various samples and to interpret results to thousands of laboratory users annually. HTML web pages are created as front end interfaces for data transfer and retrieval. The Oracle database manager on a UNIX machine is employed as the database server. OraPerl is used to implement the CGI programs that interact with the HTML web pages and the Oracle server. The two major functions of the OraPed programs are to capture inputs from HTML pages and to send database manipulation requests to the Oracle server. Data transfer and retrieval are implemented as two separate web pages with their corresponding CGI programs. The uploading (data transfer) web page sends ASCII files containing test results to the web server and invokes the OraPerl program to upload the data from the ASCII files into corresponding Oracle tables. The uploading OraPerl program identifies the target table by the data format in an ASCII file, the modifies the input data, if necessary, to fit the data format of the target tables. In addition to uploading data into Oracle tables, the uploading CGr program generates reports for each set of test results uploaded. The reports are HTML documents that provide interpretations and recommendations based on the test results. The data retrieval web page receives customer identification number, password, then data specification from a user, and invokes the OraPerl program to retrieve data from the Oracle table. The data retrieval CGI program formats the retrieved data into HTML documents that are sent back to the requesting browser for a customer either to view or to download. This system significantly enhances analysis turnaround time, giving improvement of three to five days