I am in the process of creating a site for my 50th high school reunion. I want to list all 400 classmates and indicate who we have good contact info on and those who we don’t.
I’d like visitors to the site to be able to click and submit information on people. When they click, the system would auto-populate the persons name.
The problem is the list is 400 people long and a scrolling table is unmanageable.
Java would work, but I’m not competent to use Java.
Well, you need some sort of database, both to manage the user data and
to make it simple to find someone in the list. Where are you hosting
this site? That might narrow down the list of possible solutions.
Also, are you sure you want to allow just anyone to edit any person’s
info? That might bring some old school rivalries surging to the fore…
You might want to consider allowing anyone to add to the info, like a
guest book per person. But not to truly edit or delete the data you do
have about that person.
Walter
On Sep 26, 2010, at 5:35 PM, Dave Alpert wrote:
I am in the process of creating a site for my 50th high school
reunion. I want to list all 400 classmates and indicate who we have
good contact info on and those who we don’t.
Oh, okay. Double negative then, GoDaddy and no online database…
I can give you a quick JavaScript search system that will do a rather
magical live search if you’d like. You would need to export the list
of names from FMP and get them into the Freeway page in some
predictable format. If you put them in an unordered list or just
simply make a new paragraph for each name, then this will work quite
easily.
Export your list of names from FMP as a text file, copy to the
clipboard, and then draw an HTML box on the page, double-click inside
it to get a text cursor, and paste. You should see each name on a
separate line, with a full paragraph return of space following it.
If you want to format it as a list, then select all, and then in the
Inspector, open the List segment and press the right arrow there to
indent the entire block of text one level, and turn it into a list.
Click anywhere else on the page, then click once on your HTML box
containing the list, and click on the icon to the left of the Height
setting in the Inspector. This will make the box fit its contents,
which will become important in a moment. Make note of the name of this
box, found in the Title field of the Inspector.
Apply the Protaculous Action to your page, and in the Actions palette,
click on the top Function Body button.
Paste in the following code:
You will need to change the word ‘yourBox’ in the above code to match
the name of the HTML box you drew. Also, if you elected not to use the
unordered list for your names, just change the letters ‘li’ to be a
‘p’. So if your box was called ‘item4’ in Freeway, and you decided to
use paragraphs rather than a list, your first line of script would
read var list = $$('#item4 p');.
Now place your search field on the page: draw a Text Field on the page
using the HTML tool pulled down to Text Field. While this item is
selected, change its name to ‘filter’ in the Output tab of the
Inspector, and then choose Item / Extended from the main menu and
click New. In the Name field of the sub-dialog, enter ‘id’ (without
the quotes) and in the Value field, enter ‘filter’, also without the
quotes.
Preview your page and test it out. Entering any fragment of a name
should cause the entire list to collapse down to show only those names
that match. Deleting all of the content in the filter field will cause
the list to expand to show everything again.