I have a request from a client that has me a little confounded. He wants to have a system where when someone posts a public request with certain criteria, that criteria is then used to find established profiles/agents that fit the criteria. Then emails are sent out to the people corresponding to those profiles/agents. An example: Someone posts an ad saying they have a car for sale: MODEL: Chevy MAKE: Silverado YEAR: 2005 Meanwhile, potential clients have saved search agents so that when a car is posted if the description meets their criteria they are sent an email. Thus, you could have three people, each with agents such as these: PERSON1 MODEL: Chevy MAKE: Silverado YEAR (Newer than): 2003 PERSON2 MODEL: Chevy MAKE: Any YEAR (Newer than): 2004 PERSON3 MODEL: Any MAKE: Any YEAR (Newer than): 2000 You would like all of these people to be emailed after the ad is posted, but how? This won't work: SELECT * FROM agents WHERE mymodel = "Chevy" AND mymake = "Silverado" AND myyear <= 2005 It will limit the results too much. But neither will this: SELECT * FROM agents WHERE mymodel = "Chevy" OR mymake = "Silverado" OR myyear <= 2005 That will give too many results. If you had a profile such as: PERSON4 MODEL: Chevy MAKE: Corvette YEAR (Newer than): 2003 They would be sent the email, too. But they aren't looking for trucks. Two options I see would be to: 1) Do it in reverse. Each time a new ad is posted to then loop through the agents doing a search for the criteria and limiting the search to only the previously posted ad, such as: SELECT * FROM ads WHERE admodel = "Chevy" AND admake = "Silverado" AND adyear >= 2003 AND adid = 8 2) Create some crazily complex query with nested ands and ors out the wazoo. Is there something I'm not seeing? Is there a better way? If not, which of these seems like less of a strain on the server? TIA. Hopefully I'm not just being an idiot here. Nick -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
