|  | | | Chapter 12 - Writing an Application | | | byJohn Kauffman, Fabio Claudio Ferracchiatiet al.? | | | Wrox Press ?2002 | | | | | Although this is an application of significant size, we've only scratched the surface of what it could be possible to achieve in an online classified ad system. There are lots of ways in which you could extend and enhance the application, to provide better functionality. For example, you could: -
Add a Category field to the Item table. This would allow the seller to categorize their items better, and also opens up possibilities for different ways of browsing, instead of presenting a one-dimensional list of items. -
Create a "bid status" window, which the seller could leave open on their desktop. Ideally, this would automatically refresh itself periodically, showing the current highest bids on items they have for sale. -
Add support for richer information about the items, such as pictures, links to other sites, and reviews from buyers. -
Extend the database to support multiple quantities of the same item being sold. If, for example, you had 10 computers to sell, you could enter them as a single item with a quantity of 10, rather than as 10 separate items. -
Utilize the SmtpMail object to allow the server to generate e-mail messages that can be sent to users of the system. Additionally, you could amend the application in order to make it a bit more robust. For example, there's no validation on many of the data entry fields - when editing user details, it would be sensible to force passwords to be entered, and to ensure that the passwords match. This could be done with the use of the validation controls, which provide an extremely simple way to add validation to applications. We could also use this method for the highest bid details, since the validation controls provide a way to compare two values. |
