@droopsnoot,
Thanks for the reply! I sure hope that I can solve this problem in short order, because this whole receipt issue has become unbearable!
I really want to get back into web development, but having been away from it so long, I fear it will take me until the end of 2019 to get back up to speed, and that is my dilemma…
If I can build a not-so-pretty, but working web app to allow me to key in receipt details - as they happen - then I can always go back and refine things later.
I understand how to design what I want - at least the database part - but what scares me the most is the part where i enter in the receipt details.
If I was doing this in MS Access, I would have an “Receipt” form where I would enter in the Receipt Date, Merchant Name, Location, Subtotal, Discounts, Shipping, Taxes, Receipt Total.
Then to capture what I actually bought, in MS Access, I would have a “Receipt Details” subform that was created using a control that looked like a spreadsheet. It would start off with one row, and that “row” would contain things like: Item No, Item Name, Item Description, Unit Price, Quantity, and so on. After you entered the first item, you would click a button or whatever, and MS Access would add a new row/record for the next item.
The beauty of this design, is it will handle one item or one million items! And all of the “Receipt Details” would tie back up to the “Receipt” in your database.
So where I am most confused is how to take that UI design i would have created in MS Access, and do it on the web. (In MS Access, you have a pallete of all of these dynamic controls, and you just drop them on your database form, tweak some control properties, and you have a working solution!
But for this new web app, I won’t have that luxury of MS Access doing most of the work for me.
When I used to play around with web development, I most used HTML and PHP and MySQL to build simple websites. If there was a form, it was simple like “Create an Account”, so I didn’t need anything “dynamic” or have to worry about sub forms.
Does that help better explain my knowledge and what I am trying to build?