Last week someone asked me if I could build a web app for a node in a network. Over the past couple of days I gave this question some thought, and I came up with a design of which I don't know if its doable in web2py.
The node has 250+ members. At the moment there is a master/detail function which enables the user to search for a member, and when the user clicks a member his details are presented in a business card format. Instead of this business card the node would like to offer its members a web site. This website should enable the members to communicate who they are, what they do, how they work together, news and events, where they are etc. Since there is a lot of similarity in what the members communicate, and for instance news and events should be accessible from the index application, I thought of developing one application for all 250+ members. In my design I defined a database table 'member' to which the tables containing the content for the different menu items point. Then in the controller design I defined a function for every menu item. Similarly I defined views. Since not all members will have the same menu items, I thought of defining a table 'menu' in which the members could set menu items to true or false, and defining a function menu which generates the menu. Here's where I start worrying about the feasibility of my design. When the user clicks a member, I thought of setting the member id in session.member_id and passing this member_id around as an argument in every url. In every function I would check if the member id in the session is the same as the member id in the url. If not the function should redirect to a function that sets the member id in the session to the one in the url and call the menu function to generate the menu corresponding with the member id in the url. I hope some of you will give my idea some thought and comment on its feasibility and the things I overlooked and make it a bad idea. Any comment is very much appreciated. Kind regards, Annet.
