Apply to job
In this section, you will create a page that allows registered users
see complete details regarding a job. This is the job_detail
page and it should display data regarding the actual job and the company
that posted it.
To retrieve the data, you will use a filtered recordset
that will retrieve only information about the job whose identifier has
been passed through the URL parameter.
In the same recordset you will retrieve information from the companies
table, in order to display the job and the company that posted it. All
data will be displayed in a dynamic table, and a button will allow the
user apply for the job.
To create this page, follow the next steps:
- Open the user/job_detail
page in .
- The first thing to do is create the filtered recordset.
To open the new recordset dialog box, click on the button of the tab, and
select the
option from the pop-up menu. If the
tab is not visible, open it from .
- The recordset to create will retrieve data from several
tables that are related to the job_job table
(e.g. the domains, locations or company description tables). To build
the query in a visual and intuitive way, you will use MX Query Builder.
To start it, click on the QuB3 button in the recordset dialog box. The
Dreamweaver MX Query Builder user interface will open. It provides options
for re-using already created (and saved to the MX Query Builder repository)
queries.
- To create a new query, click on the New Query button.
In the dialog box that appears, enter a name for the query, and click
OK.
- In the MX Query Builder interface that is loaded,
you can visually add tables, columns and relations. To define the tables
the query will retrieve data from, click on their names in the Tables
area (on the left side of your screen). Check the following tables: company_com,
domain_dom, job_job, location_loc.
- Next you must define the relations between tables.
To define a relation and also generate the JOIN code, simply drag and
drop the corresponding field one on top of the other. Link the tables
accordingly to their foreign keys in the job_job table. The relations
are visually displayed as arrows:
- The next step is to decide on the columns to retrieve
from these tables. To add a column to the query, click on the checkbox
in front of its name. Since the page is meant to display job details,
select all columns relevant for the applicant: the job title, type, salary,
deadline, detail, the domain and location, the company name and address.
Also check the job ID column (id_job).
- At this point, the recordset retrieves all necessary
data regarding all jobs in the database. But the detail page must display
details only for the job selected in the openings list. Therefore, the
recordset must filter out all other jobs. The criteria for the record
to keep is to have its ID equal to the one passed as an URL parameter.
To add a condition on a column, click on the ... button next to the column
name in the columns section.
- In the Edit SQL Condition dialog box, select the
variable type to use (URL parameter), enter the run-time value (the URL
parameter's name) and a default value (to be used when no parameter is
passed to the page - use -1 to make sure no job details are retrieved).
- Now the query is completely defined, and you can
save it and return to Dreamweaver. Click on the save icon to store the
query in the repository for later use, and then from the Query menu, select
Close.
- Back in Dreamweaver, in order to display the created
query, you have to click on the Refresh button next to the Query name
drop-down menu. Then the query will be displayed in the SQL text area:
- Click to close the
recordset dialog box and add it to the page..
Next you have to display the data. You can do this in two ways:
In both cases, some of the fields do not have to show up on the page
(e.g. the job and company id fields). To make the page more aesthetic,
you will use the first option. Follow the next steps:
Manually create a table with 9 rows and 2 columns.
In the first column, you will have to enter the field names, slightly
modified, to be more readable. In the second column, you will drag and
drop the fields of the rsDetails recordset
from the panel. Set the cell padding
and cell space so that fields are easily distinguished. The table should
look like this:
Next you'll implement the Apply
to job feature. This is actually an
operation on the job_user_jbu table. If you
take a look at its structure, you will notice that it requires only ID's
and a date: the job ID, the resume ID and the date when the user applied.
The job ID and the current date are already covered, but the user's resume
ID is not retrieved anywhere on the page. Therefore, the first step into
building the Apply to job feature
is to retrieve the user's resume.
Users cannot visit the
job_details page without being logged in. And
when the user logs in, his unique identifier is stored into the session
variable. Based on this, you can build a simple filtered recordset that
retrieves data from the resume table for the currently logged in user.
Simply open the new recordset dialog box from the button of the panel,
and configure it as shown below:
The last step into creating the job details page
is to add the actual insert operation. To do this in an easy manner, you
will use the ,
accessible either from the
tab of the , or from
- In the wizard's first step, select the database Connection you've created for this tutorial, and
in the Table drop-down menu select . For the redirect
page, use the button to select the
user/index file.
- In the wizard's second step you will have to configure
what fields will be used in the transaction.
As the only thing to show is the
button, you will have to set each field to be displayed as text (not text
field). To do so, select each one of them in the form fields grid, and
use the Display as drop-down menu to set
the property. You
will delete them later on, so they will not appear on page.
- Each column to insert into will use default values
from the recordsets created earlier (rsDetails for the job ID, and rsResume
for the resume ID). To use a dynamic default value, you can either directly
enter the correct mark-up, or use the InterAKT Dynamic Data to select
the source (recordsets, variables, etc.) and it will generate the mark-up
automatically.
- Set the grid fields as follows (for each, click on
the InterAKT Dynamic Data and select the appropriate options):
· The idrsm_jbu field will take as value the id_rsm field
of the rsResume recordset.
· The idjob_jbu field will take as value the id_job field
of the rsDetails recordset.
· For the
date_jbu field you will enter the mark-up
that returns the current date: {NOW}. All mark-ups are replaced at runtime
by their dynamic values. For more information regarding the InterAKT mark-up
language, consult the user manual.
· When you've
set the options for all three fields, you can directly click the button:
- The wizard added on page a table row for each of
the fields in the grid, with label and value. The value is displayed as
text, but is not necessary.
- To remove the unnecessary data, select the three
rows, and delete them. This will leave only the submit button in the form.
- Now change the submit button's generic label, namely
into , from the ,
the Label text-box.
- After this last step, you can save the page and open
it in the browser, by clicking on the See more details link for a job
in the view_jobs page. If you hit the button, and then check out the job_user_jbu
table content in your database management software, you will see that
it really works.
This was the last tutorial page dedicated to the user section. In what
follows, you will face the other side of the problem: the companies and
their needs. So check out the next
topic.
