By missym on

First off, thank you for reading this.

Here is the problem:

I have a group of suppliers. I have a fixed inventory. Each supplier may or may not carry items from the inventory. The suppliers need to bring up a list of the entire available inventory and update how many of each item they have in stock. Traditionally, I would set things up like this:

Supplier table:
Supplier id
Supplier Name
Supplier info ectera

Inventory table:
supplier id
product id (id of taxonomy as indicated below)
quantity on hand
supplier comment

Product Tables:

Several tables set up as child/parent like so:

product type contains product type id and description
Product subcategory contains product type id and subcategory id and description
Product subcategory2 contains subcategory id and subcategory2 id and description

So I'm trying to figure out how to do this in Drupal. How would you do it?

Here is my preliminary plan:

Set up the product tables using taxonomy.
Set up the supplier table as users with profiles

I've been brainstorming about using editable views but I need to make a left outer join picking up all the possible products from taxonomy and picking up the quantities and comments from the inventory table (content type) for just the current user. I don't think I can do that with views so that leads me to a custom module.

I would love some feedback before I start coding. Thanks a zillion!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x