My fiance is attending Culinary School in the fall. She and her family have tons of recipes. I'd like to try to build a database of the recipes. Then have it accesible through a simple..very simple web app on their home network..where you can search through recipies and add new ones. How hard would this be?..All I have right now is Access... any help woudl be appreciated

Blake

it would not be hard at all -- try it

feel free to come back and ask any questions you might have if you get stuck

Depends on how complex you want to get.
Simply storing the recipes is easy. Adding in functionality such as scaling ingredient quantity to make different numbers of servings, coding and translating our arcane system of English weights and measures, or trying to track calories per serving can make your application more complex.

This is a simple online one that I use. The recipes are clearly stored as a sinlge textual record and then the person submitting it provides a name and some tags. Searches are on the name and the tags. As you can see, simple it is, accurate it ain't:
http://fooddownunder.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=hearts

It doesn't help you technically but might give you an idea of just what sort of scope you want for this database.

Set up a database where you store the meal type, ingredients, cooking time, and whatever other factors are important as keys with the associated recipes.

So then, if you want to find something that can be made in 1/2 hour, you can look up "Dinner" and ":30" (the two keys) and see all the "hits" (matching TXT files).

Well i dont plan on it being too complex at all. I'd just like it to store the recipe (name. ingrediants, directions, person who submitted it, and then tags to search by) then also be able to add one simply and a simple search. Im just nto sure where to start at all... in class we made faux video rental databases and library ones but nothing like this even though it seems way easier lol

as you so aptly said, "lol"

recipe databases seem to be very popular too

in fact i worked on one last year -- site visitors enter ingredients they have on hand, the database suggests what you can prepare with them, visitors enter their favourite recipes, etc...

but if you think the video store or library databases were hard, i have news for you, recipes is harder

songs, tracks, albums, and artists is pretty much the toughest design that young web entrepreneurs tackle on their own before breaking down and bringing in the hired help

This is a sample database that I have used and am in the process of tailoring for my needs that may help you in your quest. You can set up a page from this to have someone edit online but I am not that advanced.

the original poster stopped waiting for a solution approximately four years ago

Rudy,
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