Re: Searching on the database

[David Buddrige <buddrige@q-net.net.au>]

Well done!   This program's coming along brilliantly!

BTW, I got your email about user-names - I'll get a list of users to create
in the next day or so (Perth is having an inaugural meeting next Sarturday
to incorporate the organisation and get the thing really happening.

In terms of interface:

I think we need to store the following information about users:

Full Name
Contact Email
Phone Number
State

I agree with you that addresses are probably a bad idea - all we need is a
hacker to get a hold of this, and s/he suddenly has a list of people who r
likely to have a reasonable amount of hardware on the premisis - best way
to secure this info is not to store it at all - it's not necessary anyway.
After u have the email address, you have all u need to set up a transfer of
equipment from one-place to another.

In terms of reporting, I think we need to have a search facility which
searches for all equipment based on the following criteria, and returns the
results as an on-line HTML page (CGI perhaps???):

1. Equipment type (ie. Hard-Drive, Network Card, Motherboard, RAM, Printer,
Modem, etc...)
2. Location (maybe we can define zones in the city (do they all break up
into NORTH, EAST, WEST, SOUTH?? - This gives at least a general idea of
where in teh city they r likely to be located?  (or perhaps to handle
country residents, location can have options like NORTH-METRO, SOUTH-METRO,
EAST-METRO, WEST-METRO, followed by Town names or somesuch??)
3. State
4. Any other criteria u can think of:

The report should output:

Equipment Type: (Network Card, motherboard, etc....)
Equipment Manufacturur: (Compaq, Toshiba, etc..)
Equipment Brand: (Deskpro,
Equipment Name: (This is some brand-name for a kind of equipment such as
"Vodoo Banchee?  (hey I'm an optimist!)
Equipment Description: Say 500 characters of text describing equipment?
Contact Name:
Contact Email Address:
Contact Phone: (If available - strongly recommend being optional field).
State:
Location:

I also suggest the capacity to browse the equipment listing with all of the
above fields, broken into following categories:

All Equipment Sorted by Type
All Equipment Sorted By State, and Type
All Equipment Sorted By State, Location And Type
All Equipment With a choosable Type, State and Location.

Hope this makes sense... 8-)

Anyone got any other suggestions??

Cheers

David Buddrige




Nathan Dietsch wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am defining the interface for the online database. I need to know a
> few things.
>
> How much information should we store on People donating goods. ATM it is
> just First name, surname, telephone number and email. What about
> location, state etc. Mailing address might be a bit much. We can use
> these extre fields to create more specific searches, eg give me all
> video cards which are in NSW.
>
> Another thing, what searches do you want to be able to perform on the
> database? I was thinking along the lines of give me a list of item X. I
> was thinking about doing up a program which would create a computer on
> the fly from the available parts and spit back a list, the user would
> contact the people who have the parts, get hold of them and build it.
> But that is far off in the future.
>
> Nathan
>
> --
>
> Nathan Dietsch
> SQL Server Administrator
> http://www.mse.com.au