The other day, I finally started an E/R diagram for a recipe/menu database. The hope is that Chris will be able to enter her recipes, catalog where she found those recipes, create a menu of what’s for dinner, and get a quick shopping list for the week to feed into Peapod all in one place.
Currently, Chris has recipes she likes flagged in her many cookbooks. Some, but not all, of these flagged recipes have been entered into an Excel spreadsheet, listing the name of the recipe, the main ingredient of the recipe, the cookbook in which it can be found, the page on which it can be found, any comments on the dish, and dates that she has made the dish. To further complicate things, she also has a Publisher calendar, in which she has created a menu for the last ten months (ever since we moved into the house).
Me, being the goofball that I am, I have wanted to be able to see this menu online. And of course, being goofier than the average goofball, I couldn’t have this menu online and static. So now I’m working on a MySQL database design, using the E/R diagram I started the other day. In the process of creating the MySQL database, I have already had to make several changes to the design. For example, I have removed entirely from the design a table for ingredient type and a table relating the ingredients to this table. I found that the ingredient types weren’t really all that important.
I think I am done designing the database. Now it’s a matter of data entry and designing a front-end. That way Chris doesn’t have to use phpMyAdmin to enter all of her recipes and make her menus all over again. I hope to finish this little (or not so little) project by the new year. Wish me luck.
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