User friendly input form and report generation in Mongo?

Nathan_A8 · 2022-09-06T22:57:40.788Z

Hello, I apologize if this is not quite the intent of this category but I think it fits.

I am designing a database (a bit like a living bill of materials for the design life of a large complex device) that would work well in MongoDB, but I am concerned with user interactions. I believe Microsoft Access’ Queries, Input Forms and Reports are ideal because:

multiple (5-10 engineers) users will be inputting and updating data. So having simple to use Input Form user-interfaces will ensure that they will actually commit to using the database
Multiple reports will need to be generated. Not all users will need to be able to setup queries and reports but a couple of users will need to be able to pull queries and generate reports of csv files with component dimension information, reports for design reviews with component details etc. Again ease of use would encourage their use

I don’t have a lot of experience with databases and I’m a mechanical engineer so no specific education/training in designing a database. From researching it seems like Mongo will be a good program to use for data management but may not be as user friendly as I need it to be. Access does not seem to be ideal for data management as a relational SQL database, but the user interfaces will be great, plus my company already has access to Access (like that pun?).

My concerns are that I will learn how to use MongoDB and make a lovely database that no one will use because it’s not user friendly. Does MongoDB have user-friendly data input forms, queries and reports similar to Microsoft Access?

Yilmaz_Durmaz · 2022-09-06T23:15:46.687Z

Not the Input forms but Atlas Charts might be useful to a degree you described.

MongoDB

MongoDB Atlas Charts

MongoDB Atlas Charts | MongoDB

Nathan_A8 · 2022-09-07T20:48:12.711Z

Thank you for the response, I’ll check it out.

Brock · 2023-03-31T01:11:33.354Z

@Nathan_A8

I just saw this, please save your company and don’t use Access for something like this.

You can build an HTML based webform, CSS to style it, JavaScript to make whatever ritzy animations or whatever you’d like, and then just toss mongodb on the back end with an apache web server and Node.JS with mongoose.

It sounds complicated, but holy moly is it so much easier and intuitive than Access.

Just my IMHO.

Heather_Karin_Hornor · 2025-04-12T06:27:10.354Z

Check out form.io. They are built on Mongo but can also send data to relational dbs.