Publishing a database as website

Posted by Tester
Aug 19, 2015 at 09:10 AM

In the meantime I can report some experiences with RightNote (RN) (professional version) concerning bigger amounts of data. My impression is very good!

For better understanding it is useful to know the terminology:

In RN you have a “file” (also called “notebook”). That is in essence your database. (You can have more of them too if you like.) The file/notebook consists of one or more “pages” and every page consists of “notes” (the items which are listed in the tree).

I created a file/database and imported a little more than 7000 html files (into one page). These html files were originally created by MyInfo in order to publish my dictionary in the web. Every html file represents one keyword of the dictionary (= one document in MyInfo respectively one note in RightNote after the import).

I tried it with html files because so I could fill the database in a relatively quick time. (Of course you could also create 7000 new notes directly in RN in order to test the capacity.) My first attempt failed because I tried to import too many html files at the same time. It is advisable to split the imported amount: The procedure was susccessful when I took 7 times about 1000 of the files.

After the import into RN you can immediately start to export your file/database to the webbook. This process lasted about 5 to 10 minutes (for a database of about 23.500 KB - see below).

And the amazing result came when I opened the webbook in the browser: all worked without any noticeable delay: the opening of the webbook/website itself (o.k. perhaps a small delay of 4 or 5 seconds), the opening of the tree with the thousands of items and especially both search functions (full text search and search in the tree). The search for a note respectively the search within the 7000 notes were just as quickly as in my former tests with 5 or 10 notes! That means: you type or you click the button and immediately you see the search result.

To my mind the speed when using the webbook could not be better.

When opening RN itself on your computer there is a certain delay until the file/database loads. I would say it took about 10 to 15 seconds. But this is completely acceptable for me. (I usually once open the database after starting my computer and afterwards it remains opened all the time.)

This delay corresponds with the information in the help file of RN concerning the recommended file / database size:

“A page/tree will load quickly if it only has a few hundred notes. Once there are a few thousand notes, you will see that loading time becomes slower. Bearing this in mind, performance will be best if you spread your notes over a number of pages and notebooks.

As far as file size is concerned you should probably keep your file size in the MB range i.e. less than 300 MB for best performance.”

With an amount of 7000 I have clearly hit the “few thousand notes” in my test. ;-) On the other hand many of my notes are relatively small (logical in case of a dictionary where sometimes you have only the keyword and its translation in a note). So the file/database in my test had a size by far smaller than 300 MB, namely about 23.500 KB (as already mentioned), hence only about 23 MB.

With other words: For my needs the capacity of RN seems to be by far sufficient (even considering the further growth of my dictionary or the creation of other additional databases).

Some details in RN need to be improved in any case (e.g. the full text search of the webbook which does not support German Umlaute, obviously a Unicode issue); for some other details an improvement would at least be desirable (e.g. the position and the coordination of the two search features on the interface of the webbook).

But on the whole I have the impression that RN seems to be an attractive solution - especially for people who would like to publish some database contents in the web in a quite userfriendly way. (By the way: the price for the Pro version at the moment is 59,95 $ - see http://bauerapps.com/rightnote-version-comparisons/ and http://bauerapps.com/rightnote-pricing/ .)