> the company that i work for has need for the equivelant of "an excel 
> file online... that can be edited by multiple users."
If you expect simultaneous edits, you'll need to consider some sort of
concurrent versioning system (CVS) type of provisions, or check out or locking
or merging to ensure users don't write over others' work etc.

> i told them what they really need is a small database with a webapp 
> front end that allows them to add to/edit it.
What they need is a relational database, like mysql or postgres.
 
> i have a few PHP scripts (that art helped me right... thank you art) 
> that make up a small flat-database... allowing you to add new entries 
> and delete entries. i tried to add a "edit entry" feature by my self, 
> but have yet to be able to get it to work.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems as if you are going to a lot of
effort to replicate (poorly) the functionality of a *real* database. Why?
Reading and writing to flat files is not very fast or efficient you know.
Relational databases, on the other hand, do that sort of data manipulation for
you, and they do it fast and cleanly.

> what i have would almost work for what my company wants, but... they 
> want to be able to sort the information by columns.
Ok, if you must have your flat files, you could always read the information into
an array and use PHP's array sorting functions to do this. ( See
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.array.php ) But again, I can only hope you
have some compelling reason for avoiding real databases, like SQL allergies or
something.


cheers, 

Ryan


____________________
BYU Unix Users Group 
http://uug.byu.edu/ 
___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list

Reply via email to