Hello,

I'm working on a project who's basic idea is that people register as a manager and upload a file to their account, then they invite users to view their documents (online) or download them, or allow the users to share more files with the parent who invited them.

The above is fine, but where things get bloddy ... its a requirement that the documents be editable as well as some way to keep track of the changes.

Normally if it were code files of any language, it wouldn't be an issue, but deal with PDF, DOC, DOCX its a whole different story.

I've come across PDF > HTML Converters but everything seems to be pretty useless when I move up to doc, docx.

One idea is to have tinymce or ckeditor and user can paste rich text into them and save/edit it as HTML
but again the intended audeice for this are non-technical users, using this method requires that you tweak up the pasted data a bit (can be too large/messy sometimes with a file wth alot of headings)

Any free scripts that allow viewing of PDF,DOC,TXT files ... other then embedding googledocs and passing it a url?

-------

I've got a user managment almost covered, but struggling with a few things on which if someone could shed some light.

1) There are 4 types of users in users admin/supermgr/mgr/associates
admin aside, smgr can have child mgr or an mgr can be independent. The smgr won't be sharing anything they're just company accounts who will maintain their own set of managers.

Where things get tricky is, (say two manager A & B and an associate X)** AND certain set of permissions ViewOnline,Download,Edit,Upload**
A uploads a file, and invites X (shares it with X)
A also invites B and shares the file with B

The first case is understood, but it gets messier, B may have a file and invite A
So Mgr > Associcate(mgr)

The only way to put it is that there's a lot of inc3st in this project... :-/

Click Here This is the database so far.

My plan is to add a new table user_rel or in the files table have a mechanism where parent and children of each file are specified.

If I go with user_rel coloumn 'fid','parent','child' (this could go on for every entery)
If I go with files coloumn It doesn't seem to give me a lot of room for the fact that a file parent will have multiple children ... Can comma separate values and shove em OR a child table (which i just read up on while writing this)

Lastly, there is need for having coloumns that'll have Read/Upload/Download/Edit values. My idea was the have something like (0000)(0001)(0010)(1111) and in PHP I can read out the values and hard code them or go with 4 coloumns

But if somoene has a better way to handle the stuff, do let me know.

2) Another issue that arises with the first half of this post is the editing a document from an outside source and crediting a newer version file saved to a manager/associate.

I thought of using Googledocs (i haven't done much research on that as of yet).

You'll notice that my questions are half empty, forgive the half emptiness I'm stuck here myself
writing this article alone gave me some ideas, So.. Thank you Daniweb ;-)

I've yet to add a payment system to this system, any pointer to that will also be appreicated!

Any input would be appreciate :)

Member Avatar for LastMitch

@Evil Genius

Have you google this topic?

First you need a platform kinda a like CodeIgniter or Zend Framework

Those pdf or doc converter there are free software for those.

Best of Luck with your Brainstorming

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