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Welcome to the Postgres Forms (pfm) Project Home Page

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Postgres Forms (pfm) is a client application with a graphical user interface for the PostgreSQL data base server. It enables the user:

• to design forms for adding, modifying or deleting records of data base tables;
• to design links (one to many relationships) from one form to another, for navigating in the data base;
• to design and to generate reports based on the data in a table or view;
• to edit and to execute SQL statements.

Postgres Forms is implemented in Tcl/Tk, but there is no need for the user to program anything in Tcl/Tk. The user only has to use SQL for creating tables and views and for designing forms, links and reports.

Postgres Forms makes no attempt to hide the underlying SQL. On the contrary, in most cases, it shows both the SQL statements it sends to the PostgreSQL server and the results it gets back.

See online documentation for details.

Postgres Forms has been designed and tested with version 8.5 of Tcl/Tk and with version 8.1 of the PostgreSQL database server. For more information on Tcl/Tk and PostgreSQL look at http://www.tcl.tk and http://www.postgresql.org respectively.

pfm is available in 4 variants:

1. pfm-x.y.z-linux-x86.tar.gz for the Linux x86 architecture (32 bit);
2. pfm-x.y.z-linux-x86-64.tar.gz for the Linux x86-64 architecture;
3. pfm-x.y.z-windows-32.exe for Windows 32 bit architecture;
4. pfm-x.y.z-windows-64.exe for Windows 64 bit architecture.

All variants are basically the same and contain the complete Tcl sources. Each variant contains a binary Tclkit corresponding to its architecture. The Linux variants contain an installer script written in Tcl. The Windows variants are distributed as an executable installer program.

Thanks to Mark Hindley, pfm is also available as Debian package at http://packages.debian.org/lenny/pfm

PostgreSQL is the only package that you need to install separately from pfm. All the other packages required by pfm are included in this distribution. The easiest way to install pfm and the packages it requires is to run the installer. The rest of this section is only included for completeness. Don't let it scare you off.

pfm needs one of the packages: Pgtcl or pgintcl to communicate with the PostgreSQL database server.

pgintcl 3.0.1 is included in the pfm distribution.

Pgtcl can be obtained from:

or, the new generation Pgtcl, from:

pgintcl (included in pfm distribution) can be obtained from:

Notes:

• The Pgtcl package offers better performance, but needs to be built, whereas the pgintcl package is just a Tcl script that can be called by pfm. Pgtcl is included in most Linux distributions, often with the package name "libpgtcl". In the case of pfm, the difference in performance between Pgtcl and pgintcl is hardly noticeable.
• If the pgin.tcl file is present in the installation directory, pfm sources it and does not attempt to load the Pgtcl package.
• Postgres Forms has been designed and tested with versions 1.5.1 of package Pgtcl and with version 3.0.1 of pgintcl.
• pgintcl 3.0.1 works with PostgreSQL version 7.4. or higher.
• A copy of pgintcl 3.0.1 is included in the pfm distribution.

From version 2.0.0. on Postgres Forms requires version 8.5 of Tcl/Tk. It also needs the packages Itcl 3.4 and msgcat 1.4.2. All these packages are in the 'tclkit' which is included in the pfm distribution.

This project is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The Postgres Forms (pfm)project is a PostgreSQL Community project that is a part of the pgFoundry.

The pgFoundry page for the project is at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pfm, where you can find downloads, documentation, bug reports, mailing lists, and a whole lot more.