8.2   

Problem You are developing a consultant search application where by a user looking for a consultant can check all the items in the list they require a consultant to have. You have 2 tables. consultant and consultant_qual. The consultant_qual has primary key formed by 2 fields consultant_id and qual_id. qual_id contains a constrained list with things like 'OpenLayers', 'PostGIS', 'Python', 'C#' etc.

How do you devise a query that given a list of checked options by the user, only returns consultants with not 1 but all of those qualifications?

In the first part of this series Fusion Charts and PostgreSQL Part 1: Database Analysis of USDA DB in our November/December 2008 issue, we did some back-seat analysis of a database we had never seen before and formulated some thoughts of things that would be useful to see in a dashboard as well as starting to develop some views to support our Dashboard. In the second part of our Fusion Charts series, we covered creating a Dashboard application in ASP.NET that demonstrated both VB.NET and C# variants using the database we loaded and prepped in Part 1.

In this part three of our series, we shall conclude by demonstrating the same application we did in ASP.NET in PHP.

We are going to create a simple dashboard that has the following features:

1. A drop-down list to allow the user to pick the kind of chart to display the data in (Bar, column, funnel etc)
2. A drop-down list that allows the user to pick the metric to explore -- e.g. Cholestrol, Vitamin K, Caffeine etc.
3. 2 charts -- one chart showing the top 5 food groups for our metric and another showing the top 5 foods for our metric

Our final product will look like this:

You can see the app in action - USDA Food Stats and discover some interesting things about the food you eat or were considering eating.