I have a very interesting problem in relation to CakePHP. I have a client that is currently selling products on eBay, and wants to start selling products on their own website as well. There would, then, be two separate sales avenues: (1) eBay, and (2) website.
However, they do want to have a seamless website experience for their customers. Basically, they want their current eBay sites to be categories within their current website, and their current eBay auction items to be searchable on their website.
A simple CakePHP website would have two tables: products and categories, with the simple table relation of "products belongsTo categories" and "categories hasMany products". How would I then add in the eBay categories and products? Basically, I want the http://site/products/index to return a list of ALL products, both in the products table and on eBay. I want http://site/categories/index to return a list of all defined categories in the categories table plus the categories items are listed in on eBay.
eBay has a very good pretty much real-time request query API, so I've been thinking about an option to do this, but am wondering if there is a better way... I don't think this option would work very well with PaginatorComponent...
Method:
(1) In beforeFind, capture the request parameters and save to a persistent variable
(2) In afterFind, make a request to the eBay API based on the request parameters, then manually add the results to the $results array.
Again, I think this would work for basic find operations, but I'm not sure this would work with pagination because I'm not sure how to deal with, say, a 20 item page limit (i.e. How do I deal with a page 2 when only 18 items from the database were on page 1, and now on page 2 I need to start at 19 instead of 21 from the database?)
Is there a CakePHP syntax that I'm overlooking here, or do I just start working on coding for all of these eventualities?
I'm coding on a CakePHP 2.6.0 platform.
Thanks so much for your help!
One possible approach would be to read all the products from each datasource, sort them in memory and paginate from there. The number of products would of course play a major role here.
A second one, if the number of products does not change too often, would involve a background process to retrieve their ID, and the most essential data, from eBay and write them in the common Product table, flagging the rows created.
Then Paginator can then show your results, but other fast-changing data can be retrieved on-the-fly from eBay for the flagged products while composing the page.
Related
I am currently exploring MongoDB.
I built a notes web app and for now the DB has 2 collections: notes and users.
The user can create, read and update his notes.
I want to create a page called /my-notes that will display all the notes that belong to the connected user.
My question is:
Should the notes model has an ownerId field or the opposite - the user model will have a field of noteIds of type list.
Points I found relevant for the decision making:
noteIds approach:
There is no need to query the notes that hold the desired ownerId (say we have a lot of notes then we will need indexes and search accross the whole notes collection). We just need to find the user by user ID and then get all the notes by their IDs.
In this case there are 2 calls to DB.
The data is ordered by the order of insertion to the notesIds field in the document.
ownerId approach:
We do need to find the notes by their ownerId field across the notes collection which might be more computer "intensive".
We can paginate / sort the data as we want - more control over the data.
Are there any more points you can think of?
As I can conclude this is a question of whether you want less computer intensive DB calls vs more control over the data.
What are the "best practices"?
Thanks,
A similar use case is explained in the documentation. If there is no limit on number of notes a user can have, it might be better to store a userId reference field in notes document.
As you've figured out already, pagination would be easier in the second approach. Also when updating notes, you can simply updateOne({ _id: "note_id", userId: 1 }) instead of checking user's document if the note actually belong to the user.
I'm an intern student at a company that does both wiring and aircon services. The job that they gave me was to make a database for them. I don't have any experience in anything related to databases.
So, I started to look up videos and stuff to at least learn a bit about databases and made something that works and I made it after 1.5 months of learning.
in the database that I created,
I have 1 table (CustomerDetailsT):
CustomerID (pk)
CustomerName
PhoneNumber
Address
Aircond (type and model of ac,ex: WM daikin 1.0HP)
AcDetails (what has been done for the ac.)
Others (yes/no) (Wiring, installing a fan and so on)
WhatHasBeenDone (shows what has been done for others)
Then 3 queries (CustomerOthersDetailsQ, CustomerAcDetailsQ, CustomerDetailsQ).CustomerAcDetailsQ has CustomerName, PhoneNumber, Address, Aircond and AcDetails. CustomerOthersDetailsQ has CustomerName, PhoneNumber, Address, Others, and WhatHasBeenDone.CustomerDetailsQ has CustomerID, CustomerName, PhoneNumber and Address
And 1 form with 3 subforms.
it's a search form, which would search for customers as we're typing in their name/phone number and it will show what has been done for the customer.
With this, I have created what the company wants, but now they want to add dates. Dates which would show when we have done something for a customer. Dates for Aircond and the Others stuff.
I've tried with what I know and it didn't work. tried searching it on youtube and google, but still couldn't find it.
how can I go about doing this?. I have tried having separate tables for each service, but it became a hassle when I wanted to create a new customer. . I hope I could some help, I could send pictures if someone needs them.
[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/mtrmC.png [The Customer search form] [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/A3Y9d.png [example of a customer that has ac installation] [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/dsGL5.png [example of a customer that has both ac and wiring done]
Acknowledging the question is too broad, here is some guidance. One of the nice things about Access is that each database is a single file. First protect your work by finding that file and make two copies. Make a backup and a play around version. Only mess with the play around version.
Your question indicates you are still learning Table Normalization and 1 to many relationships. Both of these topics are general to all databases, so you don't have to restrict yourself to just Access when looking for guides and Youtube videos.
Part of normalization is putting separate entities into their own tables. Also, in Access there is a big payoff for using the Relationship Tool, so here is a rather lame example of normalization:
Make sure to select the checkboxes when setting up relationships.
WhatHasbeenDone should also have WhatHasbeenDoneDate. I've wrapped AC and Other as Unit because later it will be easier than having two WhatHasBeenDone tables(AC)(Other).
Now imagine someone taking the customer request call. They just want to see a form to enter the customer details, request, unit-type, etc. They don't want to see those tables. Even with training entering data in the tables is error prone. The person fulfilling the request just wants to enter what they did and when. That's how you start to figure out what your final Data entry forms will look like.
Since we normalized the tables and used the relationships tool, the payoff is Access can give us an assortment of working starter forms. Select Each Table and then hit Create and then hit Form. Choose your Favorites and start playing around from there. While playing, keep in mind that Access will not let you add an item on the many side of a relationship unless there is an item on the 1 side.
For example I selected the customers table and hit create form:
Access uses a concept of form and subform based on separate but related tables. So, to get a form that shows what has been done for each customer I created a form for the What has been done table, and dragged it onto the customers form:
Unless an ID is also being used as a part number or something there is probably no reason for the person entering data to see it. So I removed the texboxes bound to ID's. Except for UnitTypeID, where I replaced the textbox with a combobox that displays the userfriendly UnitDescription. The ID's are still part of the form recordsources, Access is still adding new IDs and using those IDs to put the appropriate data in the right tables.
Oh, didn't we need dates (went back and added a date to the table, and adjusted the subform accordingly). Also changed the subform format from single record to continuous records to show multiple dates:
In conclusion and in my opinion your final forms will use VBA behind the scenes to insert data from the forms into the tables. This is because either you will want to rapidly insert multiple records or How the end users think about the data will not match the default forms and subforms approach Access depends upon to figure out how to insert the data. However, the default approach is fast and I always use it for version 1 of my Access Databases.
P.S. For simplicity I avoided including any Many to Many relationships
I'am trying to find an efficient approach or algorithm to help me address the problem described below.
Let's say we have a database containing a very large collection of products. Each product has a large set of attributes, although these attributes could be shared among product. In additon, product are organized into multiple hierarchical categories.
An example: Home -> Kitchen -> dishwashers -> GE Electric Dishwasher Model blablabla.
I would like to present to a user browsing our products a list of possible filters he could use. To illustrate it think about Amazon product filters on the side of the page: If products have a "price" attribute, then they show a slider with the lower price and the highest price as extremities. If the attribute is "brand", they have a list of all the brand for all children of a selected category. Categories and attributes are two separate concepts in our design.
My problem is all computing these filters takes time because we have a very large collection of products with dozens of attributes. Is there a particular way to perform this filtering? I was thinking about computing all filters at each level before hand but since a user may apply the filter at a higher category and keep navigating down into more specific categories, the latter categories would need to be recomputed/updated anyway.
What we have tried: for each product in a selected category we compute the intersection of attributes and create filters based on it. results are not cached since filters propagate from parents to children categories when applied.
PS: the database I am using is SQL server 2012. Let me know if more information is needed to better answer/understand my question. Also if you think of more appropriate tags for this question, please feel free to update it.
I have a strange requirement in Solr.
The business model is like for each store in state (say victoria), we have different sales catalog (like Richmond, Brunswick etc) which in turn act as fulfillment centers on their own.
so my url of storeId- vic and catalogId-Richmond will retrieve me catalogues with richmond's store.
Now the requirement is I need to filter out the products based on the inventory for each of these sales catalogues.
I constructed a TI table which has the following structure
catentry_id -------- QUANTITY_RICFUL-------------QUANTITY_BrunFUL
1234-------------------0------------------------------------20
I had incorporate the changes in solr query to add these columns in the final result too.
But I do not know how to filter out the products in the front end during catalogue navigation or during search.
Any help would be much appreciated!!!
So basically you want to tie the returned catalog entries in a list with inventory? For instance, when they click on a category you do not want to display products with no inventory?
This would be a customization you can either do at the Solr Level or at the JSP level. You should probably track inventory in commerce (import it) into a field Solr can key off of and then only return items with the flag set to greater than zero. I am not sure if you need actual inventory or just a boolean. Are you using a single fulfillment center or multiple ones? Multiple gets a bit trickier and it would require them to log in most likely but then fulfillment would be addressed by the ship to address.
If the store is set up with ATP inventory then you should just get this for free, as products not in stock will simply not be displayed. Check out this page in the infocenter - http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v6r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.commerce.user.doc%2Fconcepts%2Fcosatpatpandnonatp.htm
I am not sure what you are trying to ask here but it seems you are trying to display a Quantity dropdown or display an Quantity field under each product on a search page which to me makes no sense from a UI perspective. Also keep in mind if you have integrated with a 3rd party inventory model that runs every few mins/hours etc. How often do you plan to run indexing etc?
I would rather leave such complexity to a Prodcut Detail page. If you do require to show an Quantity field on the search page I would rather prefer displaying a QuickView popup/modal that displays the color/size attributes with the quantity dropdown etc and enable a user to add an item to his/her shopping cart.
first of all sorry for my bad english hehehe I need some help, I want to design a database for a website, like a mini Amazon. This database will manage every kind of products (TV, cars, computers, books, videogames, penciles, tables, pants...), but also, each product must have some properties (that will be indexed) for example, if the product is a book, the properties will be something like genre, year, author. If the product is a TV, the properties will be something like size, color, also year. And if the product is a car, the properties will be something like year, color, model, for example. So, this is my idea:
One table to manage departments (like electronics, books...)
One table to manage categories of the departments, this table will be a child of the previous. If the department is electronics, here will be audio, tv and video, games... (each category belongs to one department, the relationship is one department to many categories)
One table to manage the products (each product belongs to one category, the relationship is one category to many products)
One table to manage properties (like year, color, genre, model...)
One table to engage products with properties, this table will be called ProductProperties
Im not sure if this is the best way, the database will be huge, I will develop the database on MySQL. But, I think this is not the best way, this article talks about "Database Abstraction: Aggregation and Generalization" http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/index.php?id=433, in other words generic objects (I think), but this way is old (70s). In this article http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/ten-common-database-design-mistakes/ in the section "One table to hold all domain values" says that this is a wrong way... Im saying all of this because of the table ProductProperties, I dont know if I make this table or if I make especific tables for each kind of products.
Do you have any suggestion? Or do you have a better idea?
Thanks in advance, take care!!!
1.One table to manage departments (like electronics, books...)
2.One table to manage categories of the departments, this table will be a
child of the previous. If the
department is electronics, here will
be audio, tv and video, games... (each
category belongs to one department,
the relationship is one department to
many categories)
Why? One table, categories, forming a hierarchy. More flexible.
3.One table to manage the products (each product belongs to one category,
the relationship is one category to
many products)
Why? Allow m:n here. A product in many categorries.
Im not sure if this is the best way,
the database will be huge
Ah - no. Sorry. Nontrivial, yes. Hugh? No. Just to get you an idea of hugh - I have a db I am adding 1.2 billion rows PER DAY to a specific table. On average. THIS is big. YOu end up with what - 100.000 items? not even worth mentioning.
Pablo89, the description of what you want is very close to what the AdventureWorks database for SQL Server does. There are many examples of using AdventureWorks on the Web from web applicatons to reporting to BI.
Download and install SQL Server Express 2008 R2. Download and install the sample database for the above product. Inspect the database design for AdventureWorks.
Use AdventureWorks as examples in questions you may post.
I use AdventureWorks because I use SQL Server. I do not say it is better than other database products I say this because I know AdventureWorks.
I do not think that some database can work fast with 500,000,000 items. Complete tree of products categories for amazon.com contains 51,000 nodes (amazoncategories.info). Also the data is updated hourly, so saved product information can be incorrect. I think the optimal way is to store categories tree only get the product data at runtime using Amazon's API.