update confirmation

jesus_hairdo

on our intranet we have a section which has a little bit of information about members of staff. What i want to be able to do is for a member of staff to update this information.
I don't though want them to have to login so what i though of doing was,
Have them fill in the form with the updated information, then when they submit the form it sends an email to their registered email, in this email is a webaddress that they need to visit that will commit the changes. Similar to what a lot of membership sites do when you have forgotten passwords.
Now I don't know how to go about doing this, can someone give me some ideas, tutorial sites to look at, etc.

Thanks

Jamie

amcgrath

What you're asking for is pretty easy, but why not have them log in? Or, at the very least, log in to be able to update their info?? I think that if you do it the way you outline above, you'll have a nightmare on your hands... (if you still wanna do it that way, however, I'll help ya out)...

jesus_hairdo

i know the login system would be far easier but my boss doesn't want people to have to login. the users have a hard enough time remembering 1 password!
Any help would be gratefully received.
cheers

Jamie

amcgrath

Then your boss is an idiot.

Show a list of users, each linking to an update script.
User select (presumably) their name, sends them to a form with their info ready to be changed.
Changed info inserted into a temporary table.
Email sent to email address from submitted data with link back to another script, passing the ID of the temp user record.
User clicks on link in email, script updates real user table using the data found in the temp table, identified by the id passed in the url.

This is a very bad way to do it, have them log in.

jesus_hairdo

That's pretty much what i thought, just didn't think about it properly!
I've got the update bit all sorted.
Would you say the best thing to do would be to just have a table with 3 fields, ID and SQL_Statement and done?

amcgrath

Naw, i would think it would be a copy of the production user table (user_temp is a good name) and just move the data over... Again, I reiterate, this is a bad way to do it. How about putting a password field on the user table, and create dummy passwords and send em automatically via emial. Sure, people forget their paswords, but you could write script that, for those who do lose it, get an email sent them, basically usig the same logic described above in my last post, except this time, directly update the information....

jesus_hairdo

yeah i know what you mean about the passwords, i'll give it a think.

thanks for all of your suggestions.

Jamie