Design for large amount of data

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1

I’ve been working on a database to track safety training for employees. I’ve been having some problems with one part of the database that needs to list a large amount of data to a user that I’m hoping someone can tell me a better way of displaying it to my user.

There are 3 tables I’ll be working with here from the database. A courses table with about 100 courses listed in it. An employee table with about 200-300 employees and a course_required table that tracks whether the course is required for each user.

So, let’s say 5 new courses are added to the database. One of the safety administrators is going to have to update each employee whether they are required to take the course or not, how do I display this in a user friendly fashion to the safety administrator?

The only thing I can come up with is a long listing of each employee with a radio button beside each employees name that the safety administrator will update. It just seems like a lot for the safety administrator to do and was wondering if anyone had some clever ideas on how to display the information?

2

Sorry, I misread.

Actually yes, I’m going to group them by the branch they are located.

I guess I was just hoping that I was overlooking an easier method to do this. It appears not.

3

isn’t that exactly what i said?

4

Basically rudy said is yes, you have to list them.
My question: Can you group them? Team A needs to bbut not C?

5

Might be useful to have a simple last name filter so the admin guy can look up a particular record quickly.

And needless to say, you also want to make it easy to list folks that are already marked and to list folks not marked.

6

I assume each safety admin has their own log in, so make it so the admin sees only their people?

As for making it look pretty, maybe do columns or breaks every 10-20 people?

7

Based on their job title or where they are working in the plant. Job title isn’t a reliable one because each plant has different machinery.

There is one safety administrator for each branch. They know what courses each employee needs.

The thing is, each branch plant is different so there is no standard to run it against such as job title.

Edit: Right now they track everything in an Excel document. This is why we are making a database.

8

How do the Safety people know who needs the new courses? Could they feed a csv file to a form, and have whatever language parse the file and update the db?

9

I’m not sure I understand.

What I was going to do was have the administrator click on a link for the course which goes to a form where it would list all employees with a checkbox beside their name and a save button at the bottom of the form that updated the database. That way they could run reports on who was required to take the course.

10

you have to list the employees one by one, right? i mean, you cannot expect the administrator to enter, from memory, the employee ids of those employees who need the course

therefore your list of employees with a radio button beside each one is the minimum that you have to do

except i would use checkboxes instead of radio buttons, because that’ll be a lot easier to process on the back end