Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Hi David,

Greetings from Spain! I read your post, and was amazed at this... I just
finished a similar project for a client!

> I have a table of companies and another table of 1,600 categories of
> work that those companies carry out. Then there is a table of links
> between companies and categories, which also records whether they are a
> manufacturer, distributor or repairer.

This is very similar to what I just built. There, they have a list of
Practices and another list of Doctors, and a linking table between them (a
Practice can have several Doctors, and a Doctor can be linked to several
Practices). Each Practice is also linked to a rep.

The rep can log on to the system to review the links. After they log in, I
display a list of the Practices linked to them. They click on a Practice,
and this takes them to a list of Doctors associated with the Practice.

However, they don't make any changes to the system, but phone it in to the
client.

> Now I want them to be able to let me know if they should be linked to
> more categories or if links should be amended or removed, but I don't
> want them to actually make the changes to the link table. Changes are
> first checked by one of our editors.

Aha. This is a little different from what I built, which is a read-only
display system.

My recommendation would be to build a "scratch" table(s) for them to make
changes to. You display the actual data in the system on the web page, but
save the data they update (as well as info about who changed it) to a
separate, shadow "scratch" table(s), linked to the main real tables. Then
for your editor display this scratch info in another screen or page, perhaps
with a button to make the changes permanent (which would copy it into the
real record). (I'm assuming your editor will access it via 4D Client? Or is
he accessing the system via the web as well?)

Or, if the changes are going to be relatively minor, perhaps all you need is
a "Notes" field in the record (and displayed on the page) for them to
explain what the changes are? Then the editor can review these and just
perform them manually on the real data. (This would be the "quick 'n' dirty"
way of getting this up, but perhaps this is all you need for this project?)

> I don't know whether to use global collections (although I'm worried
> about how they would ever be deleted), or arrays, or some other means.

I would do things in records (rather than arrays or globals or other such
temporary items), as this seems to me to be the easiest way of processing
this. 

Anyway, this is a general overview of how I would approach it. Hope this is
of some help; give a shout if you need more assistance or have other
questions...

Cheers!

Michael Larue


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