Creating an employee schedule?

[chadrt]

I am in the midst of building a dispatching system that will keep track of calls for a roadside assistance company as well as the clients we serve, drivers on staff, dispatchers etc.  The schedules we create are quite simple they consist of a 7 day week each starting on Wednesday and ending on Tuesday the fields can simply be VARCHAR (20) or something as we use the fields to note Vacation, OFF time, or 24, 6P - 8A, etc..  I am looking for a way to implement the schedule for the drivers, dispatchers and managers via the dispatch system for centralized access to everything.

 

What I see as a dilemma in my feeble little mind may be something quite simple but I am so new to php and mysql that I know almost nothing and I am looking for a way to make this all come together.

 

My problem:  we keep track of the old schedules for this to work we must have some relationship between the schedule table and the users table.  Then be able to generate a weeks worth of schedules for the crew based on input.  But how do I make it so I dont have to create another table for each work week with every driver in it?  I am willing to entertain any thoughts anyone may have on a simple way to accomplish this.  I am just looking for ideas here and once I have the idea in place I will try and build somethign and then maybe I can post the code here and chew it back and forth to figure out works best.  Your help is greatly appreciated...

 

~Chad

[justinh]

That's a lot to ask from someone 

 

 

Here is an interesting read on Database Normalization, Which I think will help you with your problem.

 

http://databases.about.com/od/specificproducts/a/normalization.htm

 

If you have any questions about db normalization, just ask