Hi,

This is Abhishek. I am a newbie in PHP and we have to develop an Inventory management application. We have a MySQL database structure which looks like this (dissimilar)

VORTEX

Table 1: hardware
==========================================
hwid | total | manufacturer | hardware type | model no | specs | remarks|
==========================================

Table 2: assetserial
===========================================
assetid | serialnum | hwid
===========================================

Table 3: assetowner
============================================
assetid | username | locid
============================================

Table 4: userloc
=============================================
username | locid | country | city | site | cubicle |
=============================================

I have to implement search facility in this database wherein the user interface will just contain a text box wherein he types a string and fetch complete details from the database.

For eg: If someone searches for "abhishek" it must search for abhishek in all the tables and suppose it finds abhishek in the "userloc" table then it should be able to display abhishek's location from userloc, what assets abhishek possesses from assetowner, what are the serialnumbers of those assets fom assetserial and what are the hardware types of those assets (i.e. monitors/desktops/workstations...etc..) from the hardware table.

I dunno how to link the tables because they are dissimilar and also the fact that fields like username, locid,hwid etc are repeated in the 4 tables... so even if I actually search in each table it might find multiple instances of abhishek in userloc and assetowner....


Please help!!! Thanks in advance

Abhishek