Back working on the bulk flex grid tools. It took a little while to get back into the project. That makes it tough. It's been a couple of weeks and then a couple of weeks before that since we worked on this project. You sort of lose a little bit of traction due to time away from the project. Anyways, got it back going, reviewing code, and slowly making progress.

Most of the work this morning was dealing with gathering and organizing the bulk edit process. Lots of data coming across, some of it is the same (no change), and some of it has been changed. Trying to keep track of what has been changed and what pieces need to be taken care of. Lots of dynamics and looping to get the dynamics to all work out.

This might be kind of techy but, the big bulk edit page keeps track of each line item id number, each field is named so that it has the line id embedded into the field name. We also track what has been changed based on some JavaScript on that page. The JavaScript keeps a list of values and then passes it to the action page. Once on the action page, we build a structure to hold all of the id numbers to keep it organized. We then loop over what has changed and figure out field names and corresponding values and place them in arrays that are assigned to the correct line id's. Once everything is sorted out, you have to loop over the correct arrays and do database updates to make things stick. Imagine if you had a hundred fields being passed back to you through a bulk edit process. If you only changed 5 fields, you only want to update those values, all of the other data needs to stay as is. It can get pretty deep, very quickly.