Updating PJAS.net
// December 8th, 2009 // Blog
So it’s that time of year again when I need to get www.pjas.net set up for the new science fair registration period. Typically, this used to require me to go in, manually archive all of the student and project records in MySQL and essentially reset the site to day 0.
Each year, I try to make some improvements to the site, both for my end users and for myself. For example, last year, I introduced the concept of a “fair,” which allowed me to keep all of the previous years data while still making everything seem to “reset” for the end users. This year, I’m working on expanding on this and using the previous data to allow sponsors to import their students again from last year. My hope is that this saves the teachers a lot of time by not requiring them to enter the same student information in year after year. As a note as to why they’d need this, most students participate for all 3 years of middle school and 4 years of high school under the same teacher/sponsor.
I have all of the front-end coding complete and the student IDs are being sent to my server for the students I need to re-import. I now need to find the most efficient way to copy existing MySQL records while allowing teachers to make updates as necessary (student moved, new email address, etc). From a few minutes of research, it looks like I can just run an Insert query with the Select statement embedded (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/insert-select.html). This should make my life a bit easier. Gotta love learning new SQL tricks.