Displaying tables of items in an application

[HebRech GmbH & Co. KG]

I'm fairly new to IPS and I don't have a terribly firm grasp of the API yet so here are a few questions that hopefully boil down to something fundamental.

I need to implement functionality that works similarly to classified ads. It works like this: Users can enter data sets with title, content and a bunch of metadata. Visitors can look at a list of these data sets (showing a subset of the entered data) and click on each entry to get to a detail page.

The data sets are easy enough to implement; they're just an \IPS\Content\Item implementation. After that, though, it gets more complicated. The documentation seems to imply that a node controller would be the way to go; however, it also seems to imply that node controllers are always bound to a database table, which represents a list of nodes (like forums). While I could do that I'm not sure whether it's appropriate to add a table containing a single row that carries no actual meaning – after all, I only have the one group of items to show.

So is a table-backed node controller the way to go or am I overlooking something?

Also, I came across this news post describing a helper class for database-backed tables. This guide also mentions "PHP classes to build tables, lists etc". However, I was unable to find any class with "Table" in its name anywhere in IPS. Has IPSHelpersTableDb been dropped/never been shipped?   If so, is there another class that handles table generation or some other convenience functionality to kep me from having to reinvent the wheel?

[HeadStand]

If you're using Content Items, the class you want to look at is \IPS\Helpers\Table\Content, but this is primarily for the front end. The simplest implementation of this is:

$table = new \IPS\Helpers\Table\Content( 'IPS\myapp\myclass', \IPS\Http\Url::internal( "app=myapp&module=mymodule&controller=mycontroller" ) );
\IPS\Output::i()->output = (string)$table;

That will generate a table for your content items using all the default options. After you see how that works you can start playing around with all the different options inside the class.

[HebRech GmbH & Co. KG]

D'oh! I completely overlooked that there is a namespace called Table. Thanks for pointing it out.