The ASP project we have been set is in full swing. The group I have been allocated are a good bunch and we seem to be making some real progress. We were tasked with making a simple initial E-Commerce site that has the following capabilities
- Add, edit & remove customers & admin users.
- Add, edit & remove categories & products.
- A shopping basket system which uploads the orders to an access database.
We used the following LDS to create the database model.

The basic LDS for the database system
As you can see this LDS implements the following business rules
a user can have many orders whereas an order can have only one user. An order can have many order items whereas an order item can have only one order. A product can be many order items whereas an order item can only be one product. A product has only one category whereas a category can have many products.
These rules where formed early in the design process and are consistent (we believe) with relational database rules.
When writing the initial core code that would run this site we encountered many stumbling blocks, these generally orbitted around data formatting when inserting into an access database. SQL in access seems to be somewhat different to what we were all used to, but this was easily dealt with using the world’s favourite tool Google.
I personally would have preferred to use ASP.NET 3.5 C# but I of course have to follow the guidelines of the assignment (or face the penalty of no Marks!).
We have now completed the category, product and user sections for the admin side of the site. We are now going to focus on creating the graphical side using a mixture of Photoshop, ASP, XHTML, JavaScript & CSS.
I have big expectations for this site and want it to appear as professional as possible,
Stay tuned for further updates!