On Monday 09 May 2005 03:19, Corey wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I'm very new to kspread and spreadsheets in general... and I could
> really use a little help in understanding something. I hope someone
> can bear with me and help me out - I appreciate your time!
>
> What I'm doing is creating a new spreadsheet that keeps track of
> all the hosts on a small network, the data I'm keeping on each host
> is as follows:
>
> ip address
> mac address
> operating system
> [port, service, version]
>
>
> Each host will have a varying number of ports.
>
> What I'm having difficulty with, is understanding if/how I could
> _associate_ the 'service' and 'version' cells with their respective
> 'port' cell. And likewise, do I need to somehow group together the
> other cells/data for each individual host so that they always
> operate as a single entity?
>
> Does this make any sense?
>
> Remember I'm totally new to spreadsheets, so I may not be thinking
> in the correct terms. I come from a programming background, so I'm
> thinking in terms of programming and databases; perhaps they don't
> relate/correspond to spreadsheet paradigm?
>
>
> Many thanks!
>
>

Hi Corey!

Just to understand you correctly, in terms of databases you would have 
something like this:

a host table with the IP and MAC addresses and OS
ip | mac | os

a table with ports and service listing
port | service | version

an association table that associates ports with the hosts:
hostid | port

Is THIS correct?


Well, you can create just these three tables if you want - maybe in 
separate sheets (see bottom of KSpread). There are a bunch of 
Database functions available, simply click on the f(x) icon in the 
toolbar and select "Database" from the drop down box.

But spreadsheet applications are no full blown DBMS. So you might 
encounter limitations that can't be easily overcome - this already 
starts (as far as I can see) with a result set that includes more 
than one result... things like "SELECT * FROM association WHERE 
port=234" are not easily done, but maybe that's possible somehow.

Maybe for managing such things a real database is suited better. You 
might want to try Kexi for this job, or Knoda. Kexi is already 
available separately and will also be released with KOffice 1.4. 
Knoda is of course also available:

http://www.kexi-project.org/
http://www.knoda.org/

They both work with various backends.

If you succeed with your task using KSpread alone, please let us know, 
that would be interesting.

Good luck!
Raphael
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