Chaining The Databases Together

[Phillyman]

So as I have mentioned in the past, these individual databases can be chained together thru relational fields. I am thinking about creating an Master Database that would act as a searchable index for information. Lets take one of @kitsunebi77 recent releases.....

On page 79 is a review for "The 7th Guest" by T. Liam McDonald

However there is no easy way to figure that out on Retromags. No one has yet to jot down on the content page within the Magazine DB, but even if they did, we are very limited in gathering the information we need.

What if we had a indexing database, that a user could go to and enter in those few pieces of information.

• Game Title
• Magazine Issue
• Page Number
• Type of Page (review, cheat, preview, interview)
• Person

The Game Title and Magazine Issue fields would be tied to their respective databases, so as you type "The 7..." the fields would present matching records from those databases. With all of that data in 1 centralized location, a user could go and filter down results

• Show me all Interviews in GamePro Magazine
• Show me all prototype mentions in 1995
• Show me all reviews for Super Mario Kart

Of course this is only the first piece of the puzzle I need to work thru. We should also be able to chain the Video Game Database to the Strategy Guide Database.....we just would create a new field called "Strategy Guides" in the Video Game DB, and have that field chain back to a field on the Strategy Guide side called "Games in this Guide".

Other chains could be....

• People Database to the publications they worked on
• Book Database to the Video Games they mention

Anyhow I don't own a whiteboard, but I am sketching up a rough draft in paint

 

 

[Phillyman]

So as a test I just created a new field in the Video Game DB called Strategy Guides, and chained it to the Strategy Guide DB. When you are editing a video game record it will look like this.....

 

And when you save the record it will show like this.....

 

 

and if I turn on Cross Linking, then this shows up on the Strategy Guide Record for Mario Paint....

 

[RetroDefense]

I'm all for improving the search functionality of the site and especially appreciate the idea of cross-referencing games with magazines.  If I could visit RetroMags, edit a game title, then associate the game with one or more magazine issues, strategy guides, credits, etc, that'd be a perfect fit imo.

It'd be a boon for researchers and gaming historians especially.  Search for a game and immediately be presented with magazine issues with coverage of the game?  That'd be crazy useful.

[Phillyman]

1 hour ago, RetroDefense said:

I'm all for improving the search functionality of the site and especially appreciate the idea of cross-referencing games with magazines.  If I could visit RetroMags, edit a game title, then associate the game with one or more magazine issues, strategy guides, credits, etc, that'd be a perfect fit imo.

It'd be a boon for researchers and gaming historians especially.  Search for a game and immediately be presented with magazine issues with coverage of the game?  That'd be crazy useful.

I remember back to the 90s when Nintendo Power released out the indexes to their magazines. It went over which issues you could find game coverage in....and what type of coverage it was. It was a tremendous help for those first 50 issues of Nintendo Power. The ability to dump all of this into a database that can be filtered and searched would be a huge asset to anyone wanting to track down information.

I know I would love to have an easy way to bring up any launch articles on the Super Nintendo. It would only take a few seconds to place in each entry, and anyone could add to it, but as each entry was added, it would become that much more valuable.

[andynick]

This kind of thing was always my goal for my Magazines from the Past Wiki, but everything had to be done manually and it just would never get to the stage  that I would like without a colossal amount of work for each magazine.  I want to be able to search for Mario Kart and find every magazine it's previewed, reviewed, tipped, featured in.  I want to be able to search for a writer and find every review, feature they've written.  And if possible I'd want to have an average score generated for each game for each format in a metacritic style.  Sadly it all became clear i'd never get my Wiki as good as I wanted and have pretty much retired it.

If you are able to quickly link games and people to magazines without having to manually create every game page/person page and manually add the links, that would be superb and i'd be happy to contribute anything i've already done for my Wiki.

[Sean697]

This sounds great. I was actually wanting to use the games database like this. When I was done scanning my stuff I wanted to index magazines to the games pages. Like go through every magazine and every mention of a game fill that info into the games page.

 

So say I'm going through EGM 9 or something. The super Mario 3 review. I'd put that information on the Super Mario Bros 3 page that in EGM 9 you can find a review on page 35. 

 

But what your proposing sounds sounds even better.

[Larlos]

Been lurking for a while, long enough that I started to feel bad for not contributing. Seeing that I have no coding skills to speak of, don't own a scanner, and was forced to bin my collection of mags in a traumatic move a few years back, I figure the best way (besides chipping in for a patronage next chance I get) for me to contribute would be adding content info into the database. However, while putting together the data for my first entry, the bare bones state of this feature made it feel like I was doing a lot of work for little benefit. So I started looking around the forums to see if there'd been any discussion of adding more utility to the databases. Reading this thread made me really excited, and I would love to contribute to making this feature as useful and valuable as possible. Having interlinked, searchable contents information for all these old print games mags would be an amazing tool both for fans, journalists and scholars. The tireless work done by the collectors, preservationists and scanners in the community -- not just on Retromags, but all its various counterparts -- is incredible, and I feel like the functionality outlined by @Phillyman here would be an immeasurable help in giving their efforts the utility they richly deserve. /hyperbole

Like I said, @Phillyman , my coding skills are virtually non-existent, but if there's any kind of menial data entry type scutwork you need done in order to put these features into place, please let me know.