--Specification for Auction Site-- There is a cycle of four auctions on the go at all times - with a week between the closing dates. (Therefore a quarter of the database is updated every week) The company generates lots of pages with details of the items under general classification. There is no search engine on the auction site. Visitors place blind bids via email which are put against postal bids Visitors register on the site and payment by credit card is accepted - but only when their bid is successful. The transaction is done at head office. At present they have to visit pages, note the details and send an email bid. They do not get any confirmation of the success of their message - only notification when they win the bidding Currently the action details are conveyed into the central system in flat files. There is no desire to have a fully automated interactive on-line auction Their client has a seperate ISP that hosts their site, and they want to keep ---What is Required-- There is a FoxPro database, existing, with product details and reference to which auction is for- this can be updated by the client. There should be a search engine which will generate the html pages in response to a request for specific types of item. This would be backed up by an auto - generating process which would be capable of browsing all items in the auction. Where images of the items are available, it would be worth including them on the pages. After registering (or logging on via membership), the visitor should be able to browse the generated pages to select items to add to a shopping basket, noting a level of bid on each. The visitor should either see the basket while browsing, or have an on screen summary of the contents / value so far. They should be able to delete from the basket before posting it. When the visitor finishes bidding they should be able to post the result. The server should send them immediate confirmation of their bidding. It should retain the bid details and perhaps, also email every bidder to notify them of the result of the auction at its conclusion. I hope to here from you as soon as possible with your responses. Please feel free to include any information that you think is relevant to the roles offered. Assumptions: 1. The Foxpro database is not connected to the web, but housed in the clients offices. 2. The structure of the webdatabase may not be identical to the foxpro db. Steps: 1. Write dbupload script, which is run creates a new database definition in SQL. This is run against the FoxPro database everytime that the data is published. Photographs have references in the DB and are named in a consistent fashion. 2. Decide on OS and DB for web. This may be a problem if we are not in control of the server. 3. Write template pages in ASP/JSP/Webmacro/Paneris Perl Templates 4. Write search script (similar to Iglu property search). 5. Write 'shopping basket', similar to bloomsbury/iglu. 6. Write bid script. I hope that the above isn't too sketchy. The job is a big one but easy, especially as it shares shopping basket, login and search with iglu which we have just finished.
Document Dated: Fri Feb 19 17:57:00 1999
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