IU Inventory Database Sites
For an individual project I completed in my audio engineering program, I created a website that contains a database of the inventory that the Jacobs School of Music owns. New students in the program, as well as many upperclassmen, have trouble remembering where certain microphones are located. The website allows them to search for a microphone by name and filter their search by location. My mother works at the Pathology Lab in IU Health, and she realized the website I made for Jacobs could also be useful for the Pathology Lab's inventory. I duplicated the source code for the original website to create a new similar site that contains a database full of the microscopes that the Pathology Lab owns. Click the buttons below to explore the two websites.
Project Description
The websites were created on the IU Sitehost web infrastructure. They are written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. However, a lot of the front-end development was automated using IU's Rivet design system. Rivet provides templates and guidelines for creating IU websites. I am able to develop the sites by connecting to the production or development server for an IU Groups account over SSH.
The databases underlying the websites are collections of CSV files. I initially considered using a SQL database server for storage and queries; however, I decided to use CSV files instead since the people who are tasked with updating the data and metadata are not familiar with SQL and database concepts. I did not have time to create an interface that executes SQL DDL and DML commands, so the next best alternative was to create my own procedural queries in PHP and allow the user to upload new CSV files. The databases are small in size, so this alternative approach provides acceptable performance. The audio inventory was already tracked in various spreadsheets, so it was easy to reformat those sheets and convert them to CSV. The microscope inventory is tracked using Microsoft Access, and the data needed for the site is extracted using a SQL query and then exported to CSV.
The audio inventory site is popular among the audio engineering students at Jacobs, and the microscope inventory site will be used by technicians and faculty at the IU Pathology Lab. The second site is still under development.
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