Order Management System

versatilewt

Ok .. here's what I'm trying to do, but I'm not quite sure how to go about it.

I have an order system I am developing, and at times I want to quote a job to multiple vendors. The info about the job will show up in their vendor area login, once they respond the info will go away. I want the vendors to all post their prices and terms to one location (a simple textarea form post) but I don't want vendors to see what the others have posted. I prefer to use flatfiles for this particular part of the app so that they can be deleted easily.

Suggestions?

planetsim

Personally i feel using a database much easier to delete, update and display data as well as it being much faster. Flatfiles are great if you have little data but once they become big and cumbersome they very slow loading and take a long time to change data.

However if you wish to use flatfiles. Why not use them outside the WWW Document Root.

E.g.

/home/username/public_html (public_html is the WWW DocumentRoot)

Placing the files in the username in this example is outside the WWW DocumentRoot.

Accessing the files. You must do it directly e.g.

/home/username/test.txt

versatilewt

I could go the database route, but I'm not sure exactly how I should go about that. That's why I was avoiding it -- I imagine I'd need something messageboard or blog style. Suggestions?

The flatfiles wouldnt have much info however, just a few kb of info.

Weedpacket

Your vendors won't see anything from other vendors if you don't give it to them. If you store the vendor's ID with each submission, then when they log in, you only serve them submissions that have their ID.

You'd still have to do this with flat files - you'd just have to design some such mechanism as the above yourself: storage format isn't really relevant to your security issue.

Databases are far more convenient: if nothing else, you have a lot more control over what gets deleted when.

versatilewt

figured it out, decided to go with the database.

just made a followup_reply table linking order number, post, subject, date, and author and did a sort based on date.