Store Locator

[ZENYO]

Hello,

I would like to put a store locator on my site, www.sisuhealth.com (http://www.sisuhealth.com)

Anyone know of any good or scripts for this? We have over 1500 retailers Across Canda and the states.

Thanks a lot.

[qball]

Well, a little vague.

What language? ASP, JSP, PERL, UNIX?

Anyway, you can do a few things. One search by zipcode. Other by country/state/town. Iffin just Canada, (we saved your **** in WWII, btw)Province/town. I hope the 1500 retailers exist in some sort of viable DB, right? Then locator page is form, feeds DB query through script that html's the result.

Anyway, I can do this quite easily.

try:

www.webmonkey.com (http://www.webmonkey.com)

[ZENYO]

Thanks for the reply qball...

I do have a db of all the retailers and I would like the search to be by Province/city.

The site is on a NT server.

What language do you think is best? I really don't know a lot outside HTML. I would assume though that CGI or PERL are the best options?

AL

[This message has been edited by ZENYO (edited 07-16-2001).]

[This message has been edited by ZENYO (edited 07-16-2001).]

[spark]

what kind of database engine do you use? SQL Server? MS Access? Oracle or whatever? if it's text file, you can skip the rest of the e-mail, as i don't have experience working with text files.

If your web server is Internet information server, ASP might be the best bet. it's pretty easy to learn. and it has pretty powerful data access. you can use asp to access pretty much any database that supports ODBC. hope that helps.

[qball]

spark is right on. ASP can access text files easily.

Anyway, what type of DB and other resources will determine how to proceed. As ISP is running NT and most likely IIS, then ASP is a good choice. You can probably even use an Access DB.

Search by province/city is made slightly more difficult by HTML. The ideal is a dropdown of provinces. Once user chooses province, populate city dropdown with cities within province. You can kinda sorta do this on one page, but it is messy and kludgy and response time is an issue.

So, a good solution is the 'wizard' based approach. First search page has user choose province from dropdown. That's it, real simple. The next page uses the province chosen to build dropdown of cities (DB query). When user chooses city, next pages shows all locations for that city.

If you want the user to have the ability to type in the city, this can be a different form. If you do this you need some sort of fuzzy matching to display list of matches (almost matches?).