Help with site feature

[BusterLee]

Okay... here is the situation.

Scenario: I own a community website and I am doing some stuff for a local council. I live in a village that has 3 council wards and it depends what road you are on as to what ward you are in. I have been asked to provide a way so that people can easily see what ward they are in based on their streetname.

I have got full lists of streets by the relevant ward but I need to somehow be able to show people what ward they are in. Obviously a page with streetnames would be rather long (200 streetnames) and a drop down menu is also just as tacky.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have things like mySQL and perl etc but have no real knowledge of mySQL. Perhaps there is an alternative that would work in some way! I did think of a simple map but it wouldn't work due to the ward split not being very even. It is more on road thatn geographical location.

The only result i need is for people to be able to search or choose their street and then be told what ward they are in.

Any ideas? DO you know of anything available? Are you using something similar for a different purpose? Please any help!!!

[oracleguy]

The easiest and most efficent way would be to setup a mysql database and load the street names into a table.

Then on your webpage, using whatever server side language is available, have a text field where they can enter their street name and the page would query the table for similar matches.

There are GUIs built of MySQL if you prefer not to do it by the command line. A good one is phpMyAdmin.

You also could use Access to achieve the same results if need be.

It wouldn't require very much server side coding at all. The first step would be to find out which languages you can use on your host.

[BusterLee]

I presently use .shtml extensions but I do intend the checker to be in a new window so I have the following available:

php,mySQL,asp and perl. I have checked and it doesn;t support Access unforntunately. I did have the offer of an access Db but unformtuantely i cannot put it to use.

Is their perhaps and scripts thats may do this job? It is i suppose going to do the same job as a directory?

I am not familiar with mySQL but I know I have the phpmyadmin on my host account

[oracleguy]

It sounds like it shouldn't be too hard then.

If you already have phpmyadmin with your host and stuff, the hard work is already done. :)

You can try to look on www.hotscripts.com and see if there is anything on there that will do what you want or is pretty close.

If there isn't I'm sure myself or others could help you whip something up.

[BusterLee]

Thanks oracle. I will have a look right now.

I cant help think there must be something easy I could customise or adapt to this. It is only simple retrieval after all.

I will let you know if i need any help... cheers loads