An Online Interactive Database Platform For Career Searching

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1 22 Int'l Conf. Information and Knowledge Engineering IKE'18 An Online Interactive Database Platform For Career Searching Brandon St. Amour Zizhong John Wang Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Virginia Wesleyan University Virginia Beach, Virginia 23455, USA Abstract The purpose of this research is to create a functional social platform for rising graduates, recent graduates, and veterans in the work force to help guide those who are about to graduate and start on career searching. This program allows these groups of people to connect and interact with others. The approach used was a focus in security and functionality. The key features are an interactive partners list, an interests list, a commenting function for each interest to interact with others with the same interests, a partner search, and a secure login and logout feature. The project was implemented with CSS, HTML, PHP, and MySQL. Keywords: database, career searching, PHP, MySQL 1. Introduction What are the official steps that one who just graduated take in order to launch their career? How do they know the countless interviews are for the right company that could help them propel their career? These were the questions that gave this project life [1]. This project is specifically aimed at college students and those who just recently graduated. That is why this project matters. Many students in college or who just graduated are struggling to find their preferred career choice, yet along a singled job. This website should allow these people to create a very basic research template and some references to allow themselves to retrieve information from others in their interested fields that are already established. The paper is organized in the following sections. The logical structure of the system is introduced in the next section. In Section 3, the details of the main modules for case study are presented as well as the code samples. Conclusion is given in Section System Structure In order to accomplish the goals proposed in the abstract, the first step was to focus on a secure log in feature [2]. Next, was to allow the user s to request partners which allowed them to view each other s personal information in order to further communicate. The other significant result from research was the creation of a dynamic page which allowed users to communicate between others with the same interest. First, the user would select their career interests, then the information would be sent to a table that stored the user s ID number and the selected interest. Then, for each interest that person selected, they were able to see the posting page for the interest and have the option of being able to post a comment. This was done by creating a table for each possible career interest that contains a user s username and the comment they posted. Finally, a log out feature was incorporated to ensure that no session variables were vulnerable when a user was done [3]. When visiting the site, the user will first be sent to FirstStepIndex.php where they would have the option to register an account or to log in. If an account is set up then the user will have multiple options. Some of these options are visiting their profile information, selecting career interests, and requesting partners as friends. These function pages are all available on a sidebar so the user to view all of their options at the same time. The system flowchart is shown in Figure 1. The first tables that were created were to allow the user s to register an account and be able to log in afterwards. First, the table FirstStep was created in order to allow the a user s password to be securely stored. The username and passwords were passed through the md5 function in order to make sure no one, even the administrator, knows anyone s passwords. In order to utilize the personal information and be able to present it on the web page, a second table had to be formed that contains the user s personal information.

2 Int'l Conf. Information and Knowledge Engineering IKE'18 23 Function Pages FirstStepIndex.php MyProfile.ph MyProfileSettin gs.php OldUser.php CareerIntersts.ph MyProfileSettin gsaction.php NewUser.php CareerInterstsAction.php MyIntersts.ph MyInterstsAction.p NewUserAction.php FirstStepHomePage. Other functional modules Fig. 1 The system flowchart Fig. 2 The FirstStep table structure The table FirstStep2 contains the user s personal information such as and phone number but does not include the password, therefore this table was able to be safely used to output users information without any risk of printing their password. Another important table was the use of Partners. The main purpose of this table was to determine the specific status between two users. This was done by the table being very reliable on a column named Status which used 0, 1, 2, and 3 as values to determine whether a user has sent a partner request, accepted a request, rejected a request, or are partners. The value 0 means the user has rejected a partner request, 1 means the user has sent a partner request, the value 2 means that the requested user has accepted the request by the user who sent the request has not seen the notification of the accepted request yet, and the value 3 means the two users are partners. 3. Case Study The default page that you are first brought to is FirstStepIndex.php. This page allows for the user to log in if they already have an account set up or allows them to link to NewUser.php in which they can set up an account. This page takes advantage of HTML Form programming. In order for the user to create an account to be able to log into FirstStep, they must submit a first name, last name, username, password, , and phone number. This was created by HTML Form programming [3]. Before the user s submitted information can be stored into a MySQL table, a number of conditions must be checked. First, the input from the forms is checked to see if any of the required fields are empty. If they are, then a

3 24 Int'l Conf. Information and Knowledge Engineering IKE'18 MySQL query is used to search through the table FirstStep to make sure the desired username is not already taken. Next, the two passwords are checked to make sure they match so the user doesn t accidently mistype a password they did not want to use. Finally, if all of these conditions are met, then the password and username are encrypted through the use of the md5 functions in order to be securely stored in a table. Another query is crafted to insert the user s first name, last name, the encrypted username and encrypted password into FirstStep. If this query is successful, then another query is created to insert all of the user s information, except their password, into FirstStep2 where the username is not encrypted [4]. Fig. 3 The action script for new users sidebar. If the user at any time wishes to view or edit their profile information, they can click on My Profile in the Here, they will see all of the personal information that was stored in the table FirstStep2. Fig. 4 The screen shot for the profile page After the user has logged in for the first time, one of the first things they should do is select their career interests to be able to interact with others that have the same interests. Here, each interest is printed using for loops to loop through each array and add a checkbox to each row so the user can select it as an interest. Thus, each selected interest is put into an array for each group of interests that is passed on to the next page to be stored in the table Interests. Fig. 5 The script for selecting the career Another key feature of FirstStep is the use of being able to send, retrieve, and accept or reject partner requests. The partner feature serves as creating a distinct relationship between two users where they can view each other s personal information to communicate outside of FirstStep. The user can input the known information of a partner into the HTML forms to be searched where they can choose to send them a partner request.

4 Int'l Conf. Information and Knowledge Engineering IKE'18 25 Fig. 6 The page of search for partners Before the search feature is utilized, the HTML forms will go through checks to make sure the fields are not empty [5]. Then, through various elseif statements, the user can search by just a first name, just a last name, just a username, or any combination of the three. Inside of these elseif statements contain queries that will select first names, last names, and usernames of any users where their personal information matches the user s input. For each match, there is an additional column that contains a checkbox where the user can select to send or not to send a partner request. Fig. 7 The action script for search for partners Passed to PartnerRequest.php from PartnersAction.php is the array of the names of users requested. Since each of these iterations in the array contained another array, a for loop was created to store just the names of the people requested so they can be printed. Another for loop was structured to iterate through the array of the requested users. Inside this, the user ID from each of the requested users is retrieved through a MySQL query. Then two more queries are crafted to check from the table Partners if the two users are already friends, or if one of the users has sent a request already, or if a user has accepted by the user who sent the request has not seen the notification yet. If the number of rows from the results of these two queries is 0, then a row is inserted into Partners where the user who sent the request is stored under User1ID, the user who was sent the request is stored under User2ID and the Status for the two users is set to 1. However, if the number of rows from the results of the two queries is not 0, then a query is used to select the personal information of the requested user(s) and then notifies the user that that person has already been requested, has already sent the user a request, or is already a partner. After all of that, if the user has any partners, then they can be viewed under My Partners in the sidebar. Here a query is made to check if the user has any partners at that time. This is done by selecting all of the rows from Partners where the user s ID is under User1ID or User2ID and the status is set to 3. Then if the number of rows from the result of the query is not equal to 0, a combination of a for loop, while loop, and foreach loop is used to print the list of all of the user s partners from the table. Alongside this list is another column where the user can remove a partner(s) if they desire. If the user decides to remove a partner, then an array is passed that contains the ID numbers of the people selected to remove. If the count of this array is not equal to 0, then loops are once again used to print which users have been removed as a partner and for a query to be made that deletes the row from the table Partners.. See Figure 9 for the sample script.

5 26 Int'l Conf. Information and Knowledge Engineering IKE'18 Fig. 8 The page of results for partners 4. Conclusion Fig. 9 The script for displaying partners The system of FirstStep has nearly achieved all of the goals that were created when managing this project. The career interests and dynamic comment pages along with the partners function allows for a functional and simple website. More functions to be extended include securely uploading a file that contains a user s resume for others to view and securely recovering accounts for users if they were to forget their password. However, all of the others goals that were created for this project had been fulfilled using HTML, PHP, and MySQL 5. References [1] "Explore Careers." Career and Occupations Guide: Complete List of Careers. [2] "Manual :: Obtaining Data from Query Results." PEAR - PHP Extension and Application Repository. The PHP Group. < [3] "PHP: How to Get the Current Page URL." < [4] Stack Overflow. Stack Exchange Inc. < [5] W3Schools Online Web Tutorials.