Searchable Database for Student Opportunities
Request Type:
General Assistance
Forums:
Issue/Request:
We are hoping to be able to create a searchable database housed on our website that enables students to look through a variety of organizations, topic areas, websites, etc. for internship and research opportunities specific to our program. Is there a way to link an excel file to this sort of searchable tool?
Hello Sara,
If you are looking to link an Excel file to a View, then no it is not possible. What you can do is have a piece of content or Node containing the Excel file. The Drupal search options would then be able to search for the node, but not the contents within the file.
Josue
Hello Josue,
Thanks so much for your response. Ideally what I’d like to have is a way a student could go through a group of drop down boxes allowing them to choose things like “interest area” selecting food, water, conservation for example, and then another drop down for “opportunity type” where they’d select summer internship or summer research, and possibly other fields - all pulling from our excel table - and then spit out for them a list of opportunities with links etc. I know that it is of course technically possible, but is what you are telling me that the YaleSites can’t manage this beyond having students know to search our site and sort through results to get to the opportunities?
Sara
Hello Sara,
Drupal would not be able to pull data from an Excel spreadsheet. What would have to be done is put the data from the Excel sheet into Drupal as content that can be referenced and filtered via Views.
Josue
Any chance there is a tutorial I might watch to see how this is done? Or perhaps a workshop on doing something like this? Ideally I’d like to employ a student to help with this, so it would be great to understand this well enough that I could help to train her as well.
Sara
We don’t have any particular tutorial that will handle the exact use case. What would need to be done is create a Custom Content Type of maybe “Job Opportunities”, then a view that will allow the visitor to filter and sort by the specified categories. To get the content from the Excel file into Drupal you might be able to create a Feed that will import the data into Drupal and populate the view with the desired content. This would be considered a custom configuration. There is a Content Types & Views Class scheduled for February 21rst & 23rd. That will walk you through how to create content types & views, the feeds does have a tutorial in the How-To Guide you can take a look at that.
My recommendation would be to give those a try and if after taking the content types & views class your’re stuck, requesting Office Hours so that we can guide you along the way.
Josue