In this tutorial you'll learn how to create a table and enter data into it. We'll be creating a table to store information on products for sale at a fictional store.
To begin, launch Xbase and create a new document (command-N).
Next we'll need to create a table to store our data. There's three ways to do this:
- By click the the plus button in the tables section in the overview
- By selecting Tables in the source list and pressing the plus button at the bottom
- By pressing Command-Alt-1 (this will also open a new tab.)
Xbase will then ask us to name our table. Enter "Products" and click OK.
Now we can start adding fields. Fields (also called columns) are attributes of a table. So the attributes of a product might be it's name, price, manufacturer, etc. You can see that Xbase has already added an id field (which you can ignore for now). To add a new field, click the green "add field" button in the toolbar or just double click the empty row directly under the id field. Call the field "Name". Repeat the process for "Price", "Manufacturer" and "Image".
You should have created 4 fields: "Name", "Price", "Manufacturer" and "Image". At the moment, all of these fields are of datatype "Text". That's OK for Name and Manufacturer, however prices are numbers - not text.
Click on the datatype for the Price field and change it to "Number". While we're at it we can set a few attributes for the Price field. With it still selected, click the "Positive" check box. Also click the arrow menu next to "Formatter" and change it to "Currency". Now Price will only allow positive numbers and it will display data with the correct currency symbols. Lastly, let's change the Image field to be of datatype "Image". This means we can only store pictures in it.
So that's the first bit done. The table has been created. Now it's time to enter some data! Click the table and pencil button to switch to table data view (see image). You'll be asked if you want to create a form, click "Don't Create" for now.
Let's add a product to our table. Click the green "Add Record" button in the toolbar. Then double click on the name field and enter "iMac". Press tab to go to the price column and enter "1199". Press tab again to go to the manufacturer column and enter "Apple". Lastly, download this image and then drag it to the image field. Right click the small thumbnail and select "Edit in Data Panel..." to view the image.
And that's it. We've created a table and added some data to it. Tune in again for some more tales of interest!