I'm building a new application using PHP and MySQL and I have an issue with one-to-many forms that I'm not sure how to solve. Here's what I'm trying to do:
Let's say I have a customer module. When I load this module I see general information about the customer, including name, address, phone, etc. In this module, I only see info for one customer.
For each customer I have several related modules. For example, one "many" area would have orders for that customer. Another "many" area would have the different contact options. Another "many" area would have credit cards they used. I may have 7 or 8 of these related tables that I want to display for each customer.
In Visual FoxPro I created a form that had a "parent" section that included the basic info, while the bottom 1/4 of the screen had a tabbed module containing each of these "many" areas. If you wanted to switch between related tables, you simply clicked the tab at the top.
(See attachment for example)
What are some possible options for accomplishing this using the browser approach, with PHP? I thought about using include() along with hyperlinks, trying to mimick the tabbed approach, but I'm not sure how much of a headache this is going to be.
Also, the grids I used to display the child data had scroll bars, which made it real easy to accomodate large numbers of fields. How would I scroll the child area without leaving a huge blank space where the parent section is?
One way I thought about solving this was using a limited number of read-only fields in each detail/child record section, along with an edit link that opened another page for editing. Not too clean but it might work.
Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
