Very specific guestbook dilemna

Anon

Hi guys, here is my problem. I am builing a website that has online resumes of our employees, and I would like to have a footer at the end of the resume page of EACH employee so that a customer can post comments about each employee (there will be roughly 50 employee pages). In addition, I would like viewers to be able to see already-posted comments.

The solution I thought of was to make 50 seperate guestbooks.. one for each employee.. the reason being that I DONT want to force customers to register.. I want them to be able to post without registering.. but I also want to be able to delete double posts or vulgar ones as well.

My question is: I know this will theoretically work, but:
1. How would I write code so one could search for employees based name and employee number?
2. I would like to also allow customers to browse.. not just search entries.. for instance, browse all employees under "human resources" department.
3. Is there a better method to approach this complicated problem?

Please provide any thoughts or help, much appreciated.

craigh

sounds like you need a database. Maybe that was your plan anyway, but you didn't really mention it.

I think after that, it gets easy. You allow people to post and insert it into the DB based on Employee ID. You can then easily go in and delete posts.

As for searching - well, that's easy. Search on Emplyee ID, Name, whatever.

oyur browsing sounds more like a search on a broader perspective. So you give each employee a category and then you let people pick the category and then you display all the employees in that category and let them view them as they choose.

definately a database.

Anon

Hi craig, thanks for the input.
I downloaded a guestbook script from hotscripts.com and was planning on using that. It uses php+mysql so i went in and created a database.

I was under the impression for my situation, I would have to create 50 databases and have 50 different guestbook.php's pointing to seperate guestbook databases.. (guestbook1, guestbook2, ... guestbook50).
I was just pretty unsure of how to search now that I have all the data?? Perhaps you were referring to having me structure my data differently, if so, please elaborate..

The basic structure should be as follows. I want to have a list of departments, and under each department, i want employees. Each employee will have his/her own page, which a client can view and post comments on. I want the comments to be ammended to the footer of the file. this is important. I'm not sure if im being clear but hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. Thanks.

Anon

I think I would have two tables in a database. The first table would contain all the employee's information and their own resume, etc. Identify each record by a RecordID and an EmployeeID if they need to be different. The RecordID would be an autoincrement, Primary key. This table would also have a department column, name, hire date, etc... YOu can also do a blob field that holds an HTML version of the employee's resume.

The second table would have a one-to-many relationship (left Join) relationship with the first table. This would enable you to have multiple comments per each record in the first table. Just insert each comment with the RecordID of the employee into the second table. This will allow you to retreive them all based on the employee id.

Then you build your own system that pulls the information from the respective tables as needed.

If you don't know how to do all this, then a bit more research will be needed. If you can't do that and need to go with a pre-packaged solution - you'll have a very difficult time finding something that matches your needs entirely. You could consider hiring someone (lots of volunteers around here I bet).

BTW - why are you doing this again? Aren't you encouraging your own emplyees to find work elsewhere? ;-)