Help on how to create a date search?

[degirogio]

Hi, Im busy desinging a website for a holiday home rental agency. I want the user to be able to select an arrival date and departure date and then search to display the appartments available within these selected dates. The way I was going to go about creating this facility was using ASP.NET and SQL.

I am fairly new to both and I am a bit stuck on what I need to include in the SQL databse to relate to the dates the user selects form drop down list boxes.. I had thought of including a column for example 'bookdate' and listing all of the dates that the apartment is booked in this column? Then running the query to display apartments which avoid these dates? But this doesnt seem the most efficent way to me and I figured there must be an easier way! Can anyone help me out my mind seems to have gone blank!

The selection part will look something like this:


and the results to be displayed like this:


Any help at all will be appreciated, thanks!

[dnhdevelopment]

your best bet would be to write a stored procedure and make an "is_Active Colum".. So your stored procedure will only return information for active listings. so basically a select where is_active = true.

your on the right track.. now. Depending on the amount of calls you are making to the database. and how large it is, you may want to concider storing your data in a DataTable and throwing it in to the session (if performance is an issue at the moment).

also for your stored procedure. i would have it take paramaters such as "Book Date" & "Leave Date" . so essentually your stored procedure should return to you the listings starting from book date to the leave date.

i'm sure you will have more questions.. "HIT ME "

[dnhdevelopment]

here's a simple example to get you going : http://databases.about.com/od/sqlser...toredprocs.htm