Fully Interactive Data Table

The interesting thing about my schedule on Monday and Tuesday is that because I work opening shifts, I get very little sleep before, and so end up taking a nap after. What this does is seemingly split the day in 2 parts, which means I can do quite a bit of work at work, and then wake up in the afternoon and evening and do more, without it seeming to drag on.

I spent a while laying in bed thinking about what I want to do, and I'm going to skip a few things I'd been planning on doing. Instead I'm going to go straight into a more ambitious project, that will give me a better idea of the difficulties involved with my upcoming project. The plan right now for the rest of this week is to create a webpage with a search bar on the side, and a table on the right. It will connect to a database, already filled in. There will be several forms of interactivity.

First, the user will be able to change the items displayed in the table using the search options, similar to Newegg's search feature, but in real time without reloading the page. This will be done with jQuery, hiding and displaying items with certain classes, as checkmark boxes are selected or unselected. There will be several columns, each being an 'attribute' with several options.

Second, the user will be able to change how the list/table is organized, by clicking on column headers. Up/down arrows will indicated ascending/descending, and a second click on the selected column will flip that.

This is hardly a groundbreaking idea, and it's not meant to be. But what it is, is a page that is beyond anything I've ever done before, yet builds on everything I've learned up to this point. No individual piece should be terribly difficult. I think the most complicated thing will be making sure that the PHP makes everything appear correctly, with echo. It's Monday evening now, I'll put in a start to it, but I'm not going to spend much time now, because I've got plans to meet up with friends later. However, I've got a 5 hour shift at work tomorrow with nothing to do but code, so I'll certainly have something to show by the end of it.