Help design my book inventory tool

[intinst]

Looks Great! I am sure it will be worth the wait. Thanks again for the work you are putting into this.

[Cindy416]

Wow! So far, so good. Can't wait to see it in its finished form! Thanks!

[marianneg]

That looks like it's really coming along, Nog Dog!  Let us know when we can beta-test it.

[CegAbq]

I like the look & the features are looking good.

[NogDog]

Thanks for the feedback, folks. Unfortunately, the user interface is the easy part. The database design details are still changing every couple of days as I think of other situations that need to be handled, etc. Depending on what the rest of life has in store for me, I don't realistically expect anything for preliminary beta testing for a couple of weeks. Of course, anyone who's worked in the software industry knows a developer's schedule estimate is worth no more than the paper it's written on (and I haven't even written this on paper).

[AppleHeart]

Wow! Looks really good and easy that even a luddite like me can maybe use it without messing anything up. Heh! This just might be the 'thing' for me to try.

Can I be a beta tester too?  Thanks.

ebc, very technology challenged!

[geoffthomas]

All efforts like this are fun for both the developer and the community.
So we look forward to seeing what happens.
After all KindleBoards started kinda like this and so did some other sites that are now big.

Just sayin.....

[NogDog]

OK, beta testers. You can do a little cross-browser testing for me to see if my cool JavaScript stuff works for populating the "Add Book" form.

• Go to http://booklist.charles-reace.com/.
• Click "My Book List" at the top navigation bar.
• Log in as "tester" with password "NogDog".
• Click the "Add Book to List" button.
• In the Add Book to List form, click the Author's Name field and type "pr" or "pra" and wait a second or 2....
• A list of authors (well, author for now) should pop up under the input field, from which you should select "Terry Pratchett".
• The author's name field should now be populated.
• Click in the "Book title" field, and type "the" and wait for another pop-up....
• This pop-up should list two books.
• Select either book. The book title should now be in the Book title field, plus the "Series" field should now be populated with "Discworld".

If any of that does not happen, let me know, and include which browser/version you were using, any error messages that were displayed, etc. Should you want to email me rather than using a reply here, go to http://charles-reace.com/Email_Me/.

You can play around with other letter combinations in the author field to see if some slightly longer lists, but there are no other books in the database yet.

Thanks!

PS: Entering the form will do nothing right now (other than probably outputting some error message or other), so don't bother trying to add any "real" data right now.

[Betsy the Quilter]

Cool, nicely done, NogDog!  I look forward to playing with it.  Everything worked fine for my Firefox version 3.5.3

Incidentally, if you ever want to limit the possible beta testers to actual KB members, you can post a password in the members only board.  

[NogDog]

Cool, nicely done, NogDog!  I look forward to playing with it.  Everything worked fine for my Firefox version 3.5.3

Incidentally, if you ever want to limit the possible beta testers to actual KB members, you can post a password in the members only board.  

Thanks. For now no one can really break anything, since it's currently in "read only" mode, so to speak. (Excuse me while I go knock on some wood.)

[Cindy416]

I just tried it with IE 8.0.6, and it worked fine. Sometimes, I use Chrome or Safari, so will try it there out of curiosity.

[CegAbq]

Worked just fine in FF 3.0.14 and Google Chrome 3.0.195.21

Lookin' good, NogDog

[NogDog]

Thanks for the feedback. Were any of those done on a Mac by any chance?

[CegAbq]

Thanks for the feedback. Were any of those done on a Mac by any chance?

Not me; would the system matter? I can dual boot my netbook into Linux if you want a try with that. I don't understand the underlying technology enough to know whether that makes a difference. I was thinking only the browsers are the issue.

[NogDog]

Not me; would the system matter? I can dual boot my netbook into Linux if you want a try with that. I don't understand the underlying technology enough to know whether that makes a difference. I was thinking only the browsers are the issue.

In theory the OS should not matter as it's essentially a question of how the browser implements JavaScript and its HTML/CSS rendering engine; but it's still nice to know, just it case there's some difference in how the browser was implemented for a different platform. In other words, at this point I'm not really expecting any problem with any reasonably modern browser on any reasonably modern OS, but having spent over 15 years in the software testing field, I always expect the unexpected.

[CegAbq]

I just tested using the Ubuntu OS through FF & everything is fine.

[NogDog]

Getting closer: the add book form now does some basic validation (required fields and such), and if you enter it without any validation errors it shows an array of what you entered. Perhaps tomorrow while watching football I'll see how far I can get with actually inserting that data into the DB. (It's not just a simple insert into a table, but queries to see if the author, book, and/or series are already in the DB, then updating/inserting about half a dozen different tables.  -- so no promises!)

[CegAbq]

  -- so no promises!)

[NogDog]

I decided to go ahead and buy my domain name now before someone else does, so some time in the next day or two, if you find that "booklist.charles-reace.com" does not work, go to "www.EZBookList.com".

[NogDog]

Just wanted to let y'all know that this project is not dead, it just got back-burnered for awhile (work, life, etc.).

Anyway, I've gotten a lot done the last couple days and may be ready for some more testing later this week, so stay tuned....

PS: For the geekily curious, I just figured out this database query for displaying a user's book list, to give you some idea of what I'm dealing with:

SELECT
   li.id,
   a.last_name,
   a.first_name,
   b.title,
   s.series,
   bf.format,
   bs.status,
   lic.comment,
   GROUP_CONCAT(lk.keyword SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM
   `list_item` AS `li`
   INNER JOIN `book` AS `b` ON li.book_id = b.id
   INNER JOIN `author_to_book` AS `a2b` ON a2b.book_id = b.id
   INNER JOIN `author` AS `a` ON a2b.author_id = a.id
   INNER JOIN `book_status` AS `bs` ON li.status = bs.id
   LEFT JOIN `book_format` AS `bf` ON li.format = bf.id
   LEFT JOIN `list_item_comment` AS `lic` ON lic.list_item_id = li.id
   LEFT JOIN `list_keyword` AS `lk` ON lk.list_item_id = li.id
   LEFT JOIN `series` AS `s` ON b.series_id = s.id
WHERE li.user_id = $userID
GROUP BY li.id

[mistyd107]

can't wait to see this if you need any more beta's I'm willing to help

[marianneg]

SELECT
   li.id,
   a.last_name,
   a.first_name,
   b.title,
   s.series,
   bf.format,
   bs.status,
   lic.comment,
   GROUP_CONCAT(lk.keyword SEPARATOR ', ')
FROM
   `list_item` AS `li`
   INNER JOIN `book` AS `b` ON li.book_id = b.id
   INNER JOIN `author_to_book` AS `a2b` ON a2b.book_id = b.id
   INNER JOIN `author` AS `a` ON a2b.author_id = a.id
   INNER JOIN `book_status` AS `bs` ON li.status = bs.id
   LEFT JOIN `book_format` AS `bf` ON li.format = bf.id
   LEFT JOIN `list_item_comment` AS `lic` ON lic.list_item_id = li.id
   LEFT JOIN `list_keyword` AS `lk` ON lk.list_item_id = li.id
   LEFT JOIN `series` AS `s` ON b.series_id = s.id
WHERE li.user_id = $userID
GROUP BY li.id

 
I'm not an SQL person, unfortunately. 

[Shadowraven]

I just started using one of these book tracking websites... and already it's like the Kindle   I need folders... user-defined folders.  I'm thinking it could be set up like allrecipes.com where you can either just have one lump-sum recipe box where all your recipes are listed, and/or if you want you can create folders that you create the names for.  I'd really like to create folders that say "read for college" and "teaching books" etc.

[mistyd107]

I just started using one of these book tracking websites... and already it's like the Kindle   I need folders... user-defined folders.  I'm thinking it could be set up like allrecipes.com where you can either just have one lump-sum recipe box where all your recipes are listed, and/or if you want you can create folders that you create the names for.  I'd really like to create folders that say "read for college" and "teaching books" etc.

just curious which site are you using?

[NogDog]

For those who want to do a little alpha testing, I've uploaded my latest code to my web host.

http://booklist.charles-reace.com/index.php/book_list/
User name: "tester"
Password "NogDog" (case-sensitive)

All you can do right now is add books to the inventory (edit and delete are stubbed out, haven't even started on a search/filter function for the inventory list).

If you find any apparent bugs, please post a reply here with (a) what you were trying to do, (b) what went wrong, and (b) a copy of any error message(s). Also let me know if any aspect of the user interface is unclear, confusing, or stupid.

Thanks!

PS: The "view" link for the Notes column of the book list will eventually pop up a "pretty" window, but for now it's just a quick-and-dirty JavaScript alert pop-up.