mono .NET     

In the first part of this series Fusion Charts and PostgreSQL Part 1: Database Analysis of USDA DB in our November/December 2008 issue, we did some back-seat analysis of a database we had never seen before and formulated some thoughts of things that would be useful to see in a dashboard as well as starting to develop some views to support our Dashboard.

In this part, we start the fun off by building an ASP.NET app in both VB and C#. In the next part of this series, we shall perform the same feat with PHP.

We are going to create a simple dashboard that has the following features:

1. A drop downlist to allow the user to pick the kind of chart to display the data in (Bar, column, funnel etc)
2. A drop downlist that allows the user to pick the metric to explore -- e.g. Cholestrol, Vitamin K, Caffeine etc.
3. 2 charts -- one chart showing the top 5 food groups for our metric and another showing the top 5 foods for our metric

Our final product will look like this:

You can see the app in action - USDA Food Stats and discover some interesting things about the food you eat or were considering eating.

In prior articles of this series, we covered the following:

1. Showcasing REST in PostgreSQL - The PreQuel we went over what REST is and isn't
2. REST in PostgreSQL Part 1 - The DB components we loaded the Pagila database and created a db plpgsql search function to support our rest server service
3. REST in PostgreSQL Part 2 A - The REST Server service with ASP.NET we demonstrated a REST web service using Mono.NET, MS.NET both in C#, VB.Net/Monobasic
4. REST in PostgreSQL Part 2 B - The REST Server service with PHP 5 we demonstrated a REST web service using PHP 5

Setting up the .NET application

1. Download the npgsql 1.01 driver from pgfoundary - http://pgfoundry.org/projects/npgsql. For ASP.NET 2.0 you'll want - Npgsql1.0.1-bin-ms2.0.zip and for Mono.NET you'll want Npgsql1.0.1-bin-mono-2.0.zip. Unzip and place the files in bin folder of your web app project.

2. Since we are just creating a simple REST web service and don't need any plumming of the standard SOAP like webservice, we will be using a .NET handler class (ashx) instead of an asmx. We have two versions listed below. One for C# and one for VB.NET/Mono Basic