[thelist] Andrew's drill-down problem (was: Select - forms)

Chris Marsh chris at ecleanuk.com
Tue Mar 11 09:47:40 CST 2003


Andrew

> the site is for local people

So you preclude non-local people, or people about to move into an area
from using your service? If so, how. If not, this statement is irelevant
to your problem.

> so the visitor will more than 
> like know where they live, the hard bit will be if they 
> actually know what the county is called that they live in.  
> Some people are easily confused by this!

I don't know *anyone* who gets confused by what county they're in.
Having said this; if *you* do, then remove that confusion by removing
the requirement for the user to make any decision based on county.

> When they ahve discovered that they have lived in Sussex for 
> the last 10 years and select it they will be presented with, 
> wait for it.... a list of Towns and cities that are in.... 
> Sussex.  At this point they will either see that their town 
> or city is listed if it is they can select is along wioth the 
> business type if it's there (web designer)

Why do you want to make this so tortuous? It's very simple. You have a
database. You want to selectively expose your data to a user via the
web. The criteria on which to select the data to expose? Business type.
What is the most intuitive manner in which to narrow down which of the
specified business types are displayed? Geographical location. What do
you require in a UI to accommodate this process? Three text fields.
Number 1 is required and accepts a full or partial string representation
of the business type. Numbers 2 and 3 are optional, and accept town/city
and county respectively. Whatever the user shall enter, then these
criteria shall be searched on.[0] This is a one step process, and the
user can get as broad or narrow a cross section of results as they like.

> The county list remains just in case they discover that they 
> actually don't live in Sussex at all and that they really 
> live in Suffolk!  Also the county list stayes because it is 
> in selected mode otherwise without it the towns and cities 
> would be populated with 'all' the towns and cities for all 
> the counties and no one would know where to start.  For 
> instance there are 6 towns called the same and all in 
> different counties.

You must forget everything you've already done, and attack the problem
anew. Rudy was absolutely correct, this is not a problem with code. If
you insist on preserving evil code because you can't bear to part with
it, your project will fail.

> If a business is in more than one town or county not a 
> problem it gets listed as many times as the company is 
> unique. Does this making sense?

In the words of Paul Daniels, "not a lot".

Keep at it, it will all become clear. You should now have had all of the
advice that you need to make this project work cleanly, intuitively and
efficiently. Just maintain focus on the goal, which in your case is
providing a service to Joe Public.

Can this thread die now? Please? Pretty please?

Regards

Chris Marsh

[0]This is one option. There are others.



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