By cjobes on

Before I begin I would like to ask that you not respond to this post if all you are going to do is remind me of how I don't understand Drupal and how it works. I'm a pretty smart guy, and I realize there are aspects of Drupal I have not yet fully comprehended. It is the answers to the post that I hope to shed light, point direction and encourage me to accomplish my goal. To simply write how I don't understand things, yet offer no real and valid suggestions is a waste of mine and the other reader's time. It is my hope that I do become proficient enough that I can one day help someone, who like myself, asks a difficult question with a difficult answer.

The place I work is a financial institution. We have a main database that contains three tables for the rate information.
categories
groups
rates

We pull this information and use it several ways. Here's a few examples:
http://www.cyberjobes.com/internet_shared/home_rates.png
http://www.cyberjobes.com/internet_shared/your_rates01.png
http://www.cyberjobes.com/internet_shared/rates_page.png

The tables I mentioned above are also a hierarchy. In other words:
A Group cannot exist without being assigned to a Category
Rates (a.k.a Rate Types) cannot exist without a group

Looking at the last link above (rates_page.png) you can see this relationship,
In the middle grey bar is the Category heading (Deposit Rates)
Next you see the Group heading (Shared Accounts)
Below that are the different rate types that belong to the group.

All this data is kept in one place for the different parts of the web site to use.

What would be the steps or things I need to look into in order to have this data kept in Drupal, and be used by the different blocks/nodes within the site?

I have over 10 years of PHP experience, so I am not a noob with PHP or how it works, only to Drupal. I've done plenty of study into Drupal, but I have yet to find anything that would deal with something as complex as this. The data is currently managed along with other items in an admin. I would really like to try to move all things into Drupal and not need the admin. This rates area would be one of the more complex, but accomplishing this would answer probably most all other questions and ways to achieve my goal of moving it all to Drupal.

Thanks in advance for your skilled help.

Cy

Comments

John_B’s picture

John_B commented

Logical structure seems to be to make a custom entity for each category of rates. Rates in each category can be a double field https://drupal.org/project/double_field on the entity 'category.' Each share account could be a custom entity (or node or user). Linking a share account with a rate can be done with Entity Reference or Node Reference or for more flexibility, Relation module which creates a relation as an entity rather than as a simple reference.

Probably the post should be in 'Before you start' (or 'Post-installation') forum.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors