ideas for classes
Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 4:47 pm
I've gone from uber-newb to newb to n00b to postn00b and now am on exn00bbutstillnotgood with classes and I want to start using them for my next big project at work.
I am going to be designing a contact managment system that will tie into an enrollment system (for schools) and actually have some accounting functionality as well.
I know that's a very vague description of my project and you therefore might not be able to answer this question, but I'm at the hump where I can't figure out when to use classes over regular functions tied with arrays and multiple db queries.
Sure I could create a class to do all of my queries, but I want to take this a step further and put what little knowledge of classes I have into a bigger practice and actually make them do something *useful* for me.
my question then becomes: what practical application could you see me using classes for in the project I outlined above? Again I know it's vague, but I'm going to have several different departments in my company all accessing the same data on different levels (marketing, operations, accounting etc). Basically it will work like this:
a contact gets entered to the db by X department, Y and Z departments need to manipulate data based on that contact according to how it fits to their department. Department X might need to track status of how many times that contact has been touched (by their department) and need to push them along to the next phase in their "development".
I'm certain there would be a good use for a class in here somewhere, but I just can't wrap my brain around how...which is where you come in.
I'm not asking for any code help at this point, just a conceptual idea of where I might be able to use a class to accomplish what I'm after.
Again, I understand that the information I've given you is very sparse and you might not be able to provide any solid ideas as to where I could use one, but please try to think a step outside the box and let me know ANY ideas that you might have....something I've failed to do to this point.
Thanks in advance,
Burr
as a side note, I'm leaving town this evening for a week so I will return anxiously to see any responses
thanks again.
I am going to be designing a contact managment system that will tie into an enrollment system (for schools) and actually have some accounting functionality as well.
I know that's a very vague description of my project and you therefore might not be able to answer this question, but I'm at the hump where I can't figure out when to use classes over regular functions tied with arrays and multiple db queries.
Sure I could create a class to do all of my queries, but I want to take this a step further and put what little knowledge of classes I have into a bigger practice and actually make them do something *useful* for me.
my question then becomes: what practical application could you see me using classes for in the project I outlined above? Again I know it's vague, but I'm going to have several different departments in my company all accessing the same data on different levels (marketing, operations, accounting etc). Basically it will work like this:
a contact gets entered to the db by X department, Y and Z departments need to manipulate data based on that contact according to how it fits to their department. Department X might need to track status of how many times that contact has been touched (by their department) and need to push them along to the next phase in their "development".
I'm certain there would be a good use for a class in here somewhere, but I just can't wrap my brain around how...which is where you come in.
I'm not asking for any code help at this point, just a conceptual idea of where I might be able to use a class to accomplish what I'm after.
Again, I understand that the information I've given you is very sparse and you might not be able to provide any solid ideas as to where I could use one, but please try to think a step outside the box and let me know ANY ideas that you might have....something I've failed to do to this point.
Thanks in advance,
Burr
as a side note, I'm leaving town this evening for a week so I will return anxiously to see any responses
thanks again.