If you are building an online store or just need a place to record your inventory, then chances are you will need a Product Catalog. Now you could go out and buy any old cookie cutter Catalog tool on the market. However, before you do, you better make sure you understand what your Catalog requires. Otherwise, you may spend a lot of time and money on a tool that will not fit the bill. So, let’s wrap up our catalog discussion by learning how to report on our data.

Report On Your Catalog Data

Today’s final lesson is going to pick up where we left off with our product catalog applications. In this lesson, we are going to expand our product catalog model with some tables and fields to make it more like an online shopping cart. One that contains inventory and transactions. Then we will load up our catalog with some simulated customer transactions. Once, that is complete we will walk through using SQL to pull report data from the database. Next, we will take those queries and fold them into our existing application to create a reporting tool that admins can use to monitor catalog transactions and inventory. Finally, we review some additional third-party reporting tools to use on larger enterprise systems.

This series comes from our mentoring/mastermind classes.  These classes are virtual meetings that focus on how to improve our technical skills and build our businesses.  The goals of each member vary, but this diversity makes for great discussions and ton of educational value every time we meet.  We hope you enjoy this series as much as we enjoy creating it.

Previous Product Catalog Classes:

  1. An Overview of the Basics and Design
  2. Understand the ways to store data
  3. Using Tools and Applications to Interact With Our Data
  4. Build an MVC Application to Manage Our Catalog
  5. Test our Web Application With Selenium and WebDriver
  6. Building a WordPress Plugin for our Product Catalog
  7. Building a Mobile App with Appcelerator
  8. Using Web Services to remotely interact with our Catalog
  9. A Deeper Dive Into Customizing WordPress Plugins

Other Classes, You Might Consider:

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