Two Small Questions Regarding My Order Form

[downliner05]

Hi,

I am hoping someone can tell me how to edit my order form slightly. At present it looks like so:

http://www.yorkesofdundee.co.uk/board/forms/eurest/form.php

You can download the 5 files here:

http://www.yorkesofdundee.co.uk/eurest.zip

[What the files are: form.php is the actual ordering page, order.php displays the order and dispatches the email to me, order_fns.php contains all of my product arrays, there is a .css stylesheet too.]

Problem Number 1: Since I have so many products on my order form now I would like to be able to put in titles on the order form. As we are selling meat I would like to have titles for BEEF, PORK, LAMB etc with the respectful products organised under their title. The products are pulled from a seperate file containing all of the arrays so I really don't know where to begin on this one. Any help would be much appreciated.

Problem Number 2: Although I have entered the product codes for each product I am unable to work out how to show these codes in both the form.php table and in the email dispatched to me.

If someone could take a look I would be most greatful, I have been trying to solve this for such a long time now 🙁 Either reply to this thread, PM me, or email me at: [e-mail] (I am not on msn messenger so please do not add me, email only)

Many thanks,
Will

[Houdini]

Give me some time to;
Make some coffee
then wake up and look at the files.

[Houdini]

OK since I am not the best a making catagories of meats and you have listed four, and you form is rather long with many listings could you possibly supply a list of meats in various categories or I would get it all mixed up since I basically just eat meat and some of theose name you have make it difficult for me to really know which category they belong to.

[Blulagoon]

Sadly, with your array as it is, you cant, reason being that there is nothing to tell you that rolled brisket for example is beef. I did look at the product codes, and whilst udv 1,2,3 looked fairly well ordered (Beef, Lamb, Pork) it seemed to go downhill a bit from there.

Now, if ever a project cried out for a MySQL database 😃

You could build a nice little table consisting of:

product_code
product_name
product_price
product_availability
product_heading

The last entry, product_heading could be the meat categories you want, and you could group the output from the db or get each category separately depending on how you wanted the page to look. Product availability could be a simple enum yes no field, so you could have some entries that didn't display when they weren't available, things like pheasant which are sometimes out of season.

I've briefly cast an eye over your javascript, and don't see anything that would be incompatible with going down the db route.

I guess you could add another field to your array equivalent to my product_heading db field above and use the array_search function, that might work if a db is unavailable to you.

http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.array-search.php

Sorry to not be more helpful

Blu

[Blulagoon]

@

They are British English names too 😃

Blu

[downliner05]

Thank you Houdini and BlueLagoon for your replies.

I have only just started working on this site so I'm open to the ideas put forward. Unfortunately the product codes get unorganised after 3 (Pork) because their are two dinosaurs in the office who are scared to use a computer. When they have to enter a product in Sage they just give things any old number. To make life simpler for them I have set all product codes the exact same as they appear in Sage. That way they print out the email and they know exactly what products have been ordered by simply re-entering the product code into sage.

Im not very skilled in the php/mysql department unfortunately though I will certainly look into your suggestions. I have a spare database to use but have been considering integrating the order forms with the PHPBB Database I have setup. That way a user logs into the board and sees his unique order form. If they place an order I'll know exactly who its off by their username.

@: Would you be willing to offer me a little more guidance in creating the mysql information? I can only do the very basics (very, very basics) and would appreciate a helping hand. If its okay by you, you can email me at: [e-mail]

Thanks,
Will

[Houdini]

For a simple database like suggested by BluLagoon you could use this query and build a table called meats;

CREATE TABLE `meats` (
  `id` smallint(7) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `product_code` varchar(40) NOT NULL,
  `product_name` varchar(60) NOT NULL,
  `product_price` varchar(10) NOT NULL,
  `product_availability` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
  `product_heading` varchar(15) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

The product availibility is a boolean meaning true or false using 0 = false and 1 = true. The product_code is a varchar which allows alphanumeric entry of the code for up to 40 characters, if your codes are longer or shorter then adjust the value in the braces (). It has an automatically incrementing id startig with 1 and goes sequentially to the next number when a new entry is made into the table the price is also a varchar with ten characters allowed for stuff like $145.00 (I don't have the British pound sign on my keyboard).

[Blulagoon]

downliner05 wrote:

Thank you Houdini and BlueLagoon for your replies.

@: Would you be willing to offer me a little more guidance in creating the mysql information? I can only do the very basics (very, very basics) and would appreciate a helping hand. If its okay by you, you can email me at: [e-mail]

Well, you never know what I might do for a few kilos of Venison 😃

Blu

[Blulagoon]

Houdini wrote:

For a simple database like suggested by BluLagoon you could use this query and build a table called meats;

CREATE TABLE `meats` (
  `id` smallint(7) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `product_code` varchar(40) NOT NULL,
  `product_name` varchar(60) NOT NULL,
  `product_price` varchar(10) NOT NULL,
  `product_availability` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
  `product_heading` varchar(15) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

(I don't have the British pound sign on my keyboard).

I'd agree with your database design Houdini, although for product availability I'd use an enum field of yes/no, less chance of user error IMHO.

How do you survive without a British pound sign on your keyboard, I know I'd be in one hell of a mess without my US Dollar symbol 😃 😃 😃

Blu

[downliner05]

Blulagoon wrote:

I'd agree with your database design Houdini, although for product availability I'd use an enum field of yes/no, less chance of user error IMHO.

How do you survive without a British pound sign on your keyboard, I know I'd be in one hell of a mess without my US Dollar symbol 😃

Blu

Thanks for your replies again 😃 How would I implement the 'enum field of yes/no' into the database? The less chances a user has to mess it up the better IMO :p If you live in the UK I'd be glad to send a few kilo's of venison 🆒

[downliner05]

Replied to your PM Blu, would it be easier to discuss this over PM that way the thread isnt continously bumped to the top annoying everyone else?