NCRDTA ROMs

The Mixed-Up Squares web site is one of the largest web sites in the world devoted to square dancing and round dancing. One of the organizations hosted on the Mixed-Up site is the Northern California Round Dance Teachers Association (NCRDTA). Part of their site is a list of rounds-of-the month (ROMs).

Every other month, the organization has a meeting, tests many candidate dances, and selects one or two dances at each phase level as their round-of-the-month. Then they send me a list of dances to add to this database.

Weakness

A weakness of the site is that it stores all these databases in flat text files. Every month, I edit a text file on the server to include the new information. Editing a file on the server is dangerous and not good practice. It would be better to use a dialog box to fill out the information, and let a program on the server add the new entries to the database. It would be more efficient to put these databases into MySQL.

Flat text file database

The current flat text file database looks like this:

%
Paull
The Party's Over
Download
-
Two Step
II
Feb 2015

%
Seurer
Stupid Cupid
Download
-
Cha Cha
III
Feb 2015

%
Gloodt
Black Satin
Download
-
Jive
IV
Feb 2015

You can see that in Feb. 2015, the members selected one phase II dance, one phase III dance, and one phase IV dance as the "cream of the crop" of the most recently published dances. The database tells who wrote the dance, its phase level and rhythm, and how the music can be obtained.

Extra music information

The next example shows an entry that has specific record label and number for the music, and also an "extra" field that has alternate music source information, such as the artist's name and an alternate source like iTunes or Amazon.

%
Paull
You're My Best Friend
MCA
53578
Two Step
II+1
May 2014
Don Williams, download from iTunes

The objective is to put this text information into a MySQL database, then to write PERL programs that let us add new entries, display entries, and search the database.