Selecting customer page...

[skiflyer]

I'm working on a system which will contain information for thousands of customers and I need to come up with a good lookup page, but am stumbling over bunches of ideas without settling on anything.

The system will be driven off a database, running PHP... my goal is to provide the lookup with the smallest number of page reloads. I would love to send the browser all the necessary data and work out some kind of intelligent javascript which filters on every key entered... but I'm afraid the data would be too much, especially given that I expect this page to be used quite frequently.

However, it will only be deployed over intranets, so perhaps I'm being too paranoid.

Looking just for general feedback and concepts, I'll manage to make it work technically speaking.

To clarify my thousands number, I expect a small business using this product to have 500 hundred or so customers, and a large one to have approximately 9-10,000 active customers.

Perhaps I should consider two lookup pages, one all fancy and spiffy, and another they can flip on if they have too many customers and it becomes sluggish?

Thanks all for any feeback,
Rob

 

[BabyJeffy]

Initial thoughts... you're using php and mysql (I'm assuming)... don't stress too much about hitting the database a little. It's wise to be concerned about database hits -- but the numbers of data you are talking are so small that I don't see it as a problem. Create the appropriate indexes of course.

This would be a completely different story if you were using, say, MS Access as your backend data store.

Finally, I would caution against building a solution that absolutely requires Javascript (or Java applets etc) for navigation just to function. If you have the ability to manage things server-side, do. Try to use javascript to enhance the experience (rather than drive it).

All the best,
Jeff