Creating a Complex Stockist Database - Suggestions Needed

Sunday 18 September 2005 9:29:18 pm

Hello all.

I need to create an area on my site in which stockists of my products can enter their contact and locale information. Once they have entered all of the required information it is sent for approval by a site editor/admin. If it is approved it then becomes searchable by the public in the "Find a Stockist" section or else it can be deleted.

On the public side the user should have two options to search by:-

Select Your Country: [Select Country][V]
Select Your State:   [Select State][V]
                     [Search]

On the "Add a Stockist" page there needs to be a number of options such as "Company Name", "Location", "Contact Phone Number", "logo" etc. etc.

A stockist must first select the country they are in via a standard select box, what I would like to do is set it up so that once they have selected the country the state select box is populated with the appropriate states for that country. from there on its pretty straight forward, they fill in all the blanks and submit their details for approval.

Likewise, the public page should have similar behaviour, select your country and the state select box is populated. Also if there are no stockists in a given country (ie if no one has added a stockist to Japan for example) then those countries should not be displayed in the select box as there would be no reason to attempt a search for stockists in a country that has no stockists listed.

As far as making templates to filter search results I dont think this will be a big issue, I'm sure I can do what is needed. When it comes to actually creating the country/state selector though I'm really not sure where to start or if I will be able to do it with the standard EzP datatypes.

I suppose my questions are; can Ez support the country/state selector that I need?

If so how would I set something like this up, would I need to create an extension, or is there an extension that has this type of functionality already?

Any Suggestions?

Cheers!

Pardon me while I burst into flames...

Tuesday 20 September 2005 2:12:01 am

Hi,

This is very doable. You should have two classes :
- Country class
- State class

The country class has an attribute of type object relation (see the contributions section for a better datatype). In this attribute, for each country you create, you assign the states that belong sto this country.

About AJAX stuff, check out the AJAX menu in the contribs section, this should give you some good hints.

Hope it helps.

Lex

Wednesday 21 September 2005 1:03:33 am

In my method you have to create one OBJECT for each state, not one CLASS for each state. Each state object is an instance of the same State class.

This should work "out of the box" with eZ, but for sure the cleanest way is to write a new datatype, which should take you much much longer time.

Lex