Memorial site (SQL help needed)

G

gooooogle

New member
I've always been interested in special forces and war. Therefore I have for a long time been thinking about making some sort of memorial web site. The goal of the web site is to make it possible to look up casualties of war (I'd start with the SAS as I already have info on over 300 soldiers). The web site would use SQL and PHP making it possible to search for soldiers. I'm still not sure what kind of info I need to be able to add for each soldier but I have a few in my head now.

Name, Rank, Date of birth, Status (KIA or MIA), Date of KIA or MIA, Regiment, Location of KIA or MIA, Operation the soldier was in when he was reported kia or mia etc.

It's a big job but I really think I would like to do this. Only problem is I know very little about making web sites and even less about using PHP and SQL. Any suggestions on how to start?
 
Just a small challenge then :-)

Before you do anything, you need to define how you intend to use & store the data.

If it's just a simple table as suggested, then you can probably get away with a single database table, however, my guess is that given the subject, you could need to expand on what you hold.

You'll probably want to hold a central "contact or names" table, then have additional "lookup" tables to hold additional details such as regiment etc... These "lookup" tables would then be referenced by a simple ID in the main "Names" table, thus reducing the size of this table and removing duplication (you may see this referred to as "Normalisation".

You would then "join" these tables together to reconstruct a complete record for display on the web page.

Using PHP it is quite easy to take input from a form and use this to populate a SQL query, then execute this query against a database and output the result as a web page.

I'd be happy for you to bounce ideas off me if that would help.

Have you thought about privacy issues, is this data public domain ?
 
**Moved to the programming forum from The Lounge**

The main thing with designing something using mysql and php is the planning I think.
You should think about all the information you would like to store on the soldiers then you can design the rest around that, ie. ways to search your database.

There are other very similar examples of databases which do basically the same thing you are looking to do around the net.
You could use those to help you with the coding, I have seen a lot of help tutorials/articles which all do a similar thing, you could get a lot of help from the code in those :)
 
Basically you want a simple bit of PHP code to generate an HTML form populated with the data from your database.

It's not difficult, I'm just in the process of writing a custom system using PHP & MySQL for a local charity I work with, this will be a far more complex system (generation of Word & Excel documents on the fly etc...)

Pop over to sitepoint.com and have a look through their articles, there's a few chapters of a book on PHP & MySQL database forms.

However, before you even start to code you need to design your database structure.

Normally I'd offer (for a fee of course) to write this, but the current project for this charity has been put on hold so many times and the wife will be one of the main users, so it's probably best if I get on with my current workload :-)

Feel free to bounce ideas off me though.
 
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