Need ideas for automating a complicated (many tasks) volunteer form/process. (Open for ideas from all)

Hi,

Every year our dog club has a specialty dog show that requires volunteers to perform many tasks. 3-4 years ago I created a spreadsheet to track the tasks (jobs) folks volunteered to do. Then I displayed the spreadsheet on a webpage with a form for folks to enter the job they could do by entering the cell number(s). This was very labor intensive - the form would email the info to me, I would update the spreadsheet and re-import it into the page and upload the page.

Here is a link to the page so you can see what I’m trying to describe;
http://www.oldenglishsheepdogclubofamerica.org/national/Volunteers/National_Specialty_Volunteers.php
In case the link doesn’t work I have attached a PDF of the webpage.

Where you see a name or cell number (C23) this is a task to be done.

This process has become very popular, I am asked to re-institute it every year, but it is terribly inefficient.

I would really like to automate this process where a volunteer could enter a task and the page would update to reflect this. But I have no idea how to set it up.

One thought I had was to create a series of dynamic dropdowns to get down to the specific job (Agility > Fast > Excellent > Gate Steward), but how could a volunteer apply for multiple positions?

I am open to any/all ideas.

Thanks,
Dennis

This is a job for a linking table.

you would have a volunteers (Users) table.

a tasks table

and a userstasks table.

the userstasks table would have the following structure

userstasks
userstaskID - Primary Key
userstaskUserID - relates to the useers.UserID
userstaskTaskID - relates to the tasks.taskID column

the user would log in, there ID would be stored in a session, they would select the tasks, then use a multiple insert behavior to insert to the userstaks table the userID session and TaskID's that where selected.

this is similar to the items -> Genres concept from the Manage relational table tutorial:
http://www.webassist.com/tutorials/Manage-relational-tables

Thanks Jason, that looks like a good tutorial.

I'm having trouble getting started with the task list. Maybe I'm over complicating the project because I'm a rookie, I can’t visualize how to handle the hierarchy or groupings of the tasks, example…
First is the VENUE
Agility
Herding
Obedience
Rally

Within most (but not all) Venues is a CLASS
Fast
JWW
Standard
Etc.

within each Class/Venue is a LEVEL
Advanced
Excellent
Open
Etc.

finally within each Level is the TASK
Scribe
Timer
Table Steward
Etc.

For the input form, how to weed down to the specific task. For example Agility > Fast > Excellent > Scribe, for the volunteer to select.

Dennis

you would need separate tables for the venue, class, level, and task with relational columns to relate to the previous table.

for example:
venues:
venueID
venueName

classes:
classID
classVenueID - relates to venues.venueID
className

and use dynamic dropdowns to populate the child lists.

Thanks Jason,

Dennis