On 14 Oct 98, at 22:29, Laura Hall wrote:
> We're looking for any experiential bits of wisdom in deploying a dynamic
> dealer locator dB. We're setting up a site for a large, multi-national
> building products manufacturer. The system we need to presently deploy
> would be a locator for N. American suppliers (primarily US), approximately
> 3,000 supplier records and we'll need good, dynamic searchability.
>
> We are seriously considering using a third party solution provider for two
> predominant reasons: 1. not terribly interested in re-inventing the
> wheel for zip proximity searching code and 2. the advantage of automatic
> zip table updates with a third party provider. Specifically we'd be
> appreciative of any experience working with a third party provider for
> this type of service. Economics is a significant consideration. However,
> fully customizable PRIVATE label is the upmost concern. (tacky banner ad
> covered "thank you for using my dealer locator" type stuff just won't fly.
> We'll need to fully and seamlessly integrate the system with site
> content.
I do something similar for a company. They send me their database
(which is in access). I wrote some routines in perl to run on my NT
to extract the fields from various tables and then create the tables
I will use in an msql database (btw, I installed mysql on our
intranet and it is significantly better than msql). I inherited the
use of msql on some other server.
Each dealer is listed by all the zip codes he covers
dealer 1 zip3
dealer 1 zip4
dealer1 zip6
dealer2 zip3
dealer8 zip4
etc. etc. so a person enters the zip code and I just grab all the
dealers that service that area (the data is already in their access
database).
Someone had the idea to allow for dealers to have their own little
website. Good idea but they really didn't think it through but in
any case if a dealer shows up in a search, and he has the "little
website" then a button appears indicating that this dealer has a
website. I just created a new table:
dealer website_url
Pretty simple really.
But you are probably more interested in something interesting like
the following: Person enters a zip code and then gets a map of that
zip code and surrounding 50 miles. It also shows all dealers who
service that area and either has their data on the page or a link.
That sounds interesting. You could allow the user to enter their
address and then create a map to the nearest dealer (you get some
data there).
Peter
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