The Home Stretch

Ok, now that the second assignment is in, it must be all downhill from here. Or maybe it is a steep climb to the end. It was a real stretch to get the second assignment in. I really didn't think that I was going to make it with my login and logout code. But thanks to the help of Peter Martin (another student) I was able to get it over the line just in time, with the login and logout working well.

I faced up to the reality of what I need to accomplish over the next few weeks with this assignment and wondered if I will be able to achieve what I outlined in the Analysis and Design Document. Edwin made comment in my assignment 1 results that it was a good and solid database outline, but that it was going to be tricky and complex (but manageable). This week I started early to tackle what I thought would be the most difficult part of the site - the 'add a recipe' form and its complex coding. This was a dramatic understatement. I have spent all week struggling to understand just how I am going to do it.

My biggest problem has been knowing how to approach the issue of dealing with information which needs to be distributed to several different tables and then reflected back into the recipe table and the associated_ingredients table through Foreign keys. I have read just about every part of Ullman, several times over, trying to get a feel for the correct flow of the coding for it. But there is nothing in there that is clear in how to deal with multiple tables in the way that I need. I think I was spoilt with the first assignment, in that Ullman provided a perfect framework for what I wanted to achieve with the login and logout pages. What gets me is that there are bits here and there of code which I think are relevant, but I just don't know how to put it together to make it work. Now I feel like I am totally on my own and unable to get an idea of how to even approach it. I spent a lot of time on the net searching form something that would get me on the right track. But, again, nothing which resembled anything I need to do with the form. My biggest issue is that I don't know what order to do things in, and how to link so many different fileds to so many different tables.

I linked up with Peter again on Friday for about two hours on Yahoo, but as he has not done anything like this either we really didn't make any headway. I have been thinking that I need to link up with someone locally who has a hand on this whole thing, who can walk me through some of the more obvious aspects of it. By 2am this morning I realised that i was not going to do it on my own.

This morning I rang the husband of a friend who I thought might either know something or someone to help me. I started telling him what the assignment entailed and he jumped in and said that mysql was like talking english for him. So I am going to get together with him sometime this week and nut out how I need to approach the rest of the site design. I feel so much better about this now. By having someone right next to me and being able to answer my questions and offer solutions is going to make this so much easier for me. Yesterday I was considering a fail on this assignment as I couldn't see a way out of this. But today I think I am actually going to get something out of this unit and come away having learnt something.