New Project

[pixelbend]

Hi all,

I am thinking about writing a web based work order system for myself. I am the lone IT guy for a small company (about 90 employees) and I seemed to be swamped with little jobs here and the along with the big jobs that my boss wants me to accomplish. Instead of trying to keep track of the thousands of emails that I get asking me to do this or fix that, I would like to develop a web based work order system. I would like to write it in php (with a database backing in mySQL), mostly because I feel pretty comfortable in it, but I am just starting to get into the more object oriented parts of php.

My thought is to make three different classes, one for submitters, one for workers (it will probably be more than just me using it eventually) and one for the work order itself.

I started working on the submitter (or user) class, and I started worndering:
Do you really need private data members if all of the data is stored in the mySQL database? Or should the class just be an amalgamation of functions to create an object and return data? Here is what i have so far:

<?php

//Connect to database

//User class
class User {
	private $id;
	private $name;
	private $email;
	private $password;
	
	function __construct ($subName, $subEmail, $subPass) {
		//Create new user in table
		$query = "INSERT INTO `user` ( `id` , `name` , `email` , `pass` ) ";
		$query .= "VALUES ('', '$subName', '$subEmail', '$subPass');";
		$result = mysql_query($query);
		mysql_close();
	}
}

?>

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

<edit> after mulling it over, I need to look into "worker" being a subclass of "user". Although I'm not entirely sure how sub classes work in php</edit>

[trache]

Why not just have one user class that is role-based? I have a journal system I've created in PHP/Pg that has a field for roles that is comma-separated.

"write_entries, comment_entries, edit_entries" etc.

I search for "write_entries" in the role/permissions field, and boom, the user can write entries in the diary (I've created it so many people can write to a specific journal... this entire system is going to be multi-journal).

Use a simple string search and replace to edit the field and update it back to the DB.

Subclasses work by specifying:

ClassB extends ClassB {
blah
blah
blah
}

But, good luck using information hiding, polymorphism, etc etc with PHP. The online documentation is utterly horrible. PHP4 has a cobbled-together concept of OOP that doesn't really work out, but I think PHP5 is much better. We'll see about that one *sigh*.

[visotech]

If you are already swamped with work you might want to look into a helpdesk script thats free under gpl, there are a bunch that use php/mysql...