Order ticket online - multiple selection

I am working on an online ticket booking system for my school project. I have done some research on a few web sites and notice that a few of them allow the users to select the seats as displayed on the screen. It is such a nice feature that I would like to add it to my project but I am new to ASP.Net and C#, thus I am not sure how difficult to implement such thing. Can someone please tell me how to do this? Can I use button control to represent each seat? If so, how to I capture multiple selection from user? Say the user select 2 seats in the last row before clicking the Next button to indicate ordering 2 tickets and the choice of seats.

Thanks in advance!

re: Order ticket online - multiple selection

There are many ways to solve this.

You could create an image of the seating plan and then use the ImageMap control to let users select sections and/or individual seats.

Or you could create a Silverlight Application. This is a lot more interesting and will allow you to do much more graphically client side than you would using regular ASP.NET.

Or you could use links as you suggested, but I think the ImageMap is probably the easiest/most appealing approach to solving this.

Ticketmaster.ca uses ImageMaps :)


-Frinny

re: Order ticket online - multiple selection

I forgot to mention that when a user click a "seat", he/she can also click the same "seat" to deselect it. I doubt imagemap control or button control can do this.

re: Order ticket online - multiple selection

It is most definitely possible.

If you have any code you can be assisted with, please post it! : )

re: Order ticket online - multiple selection

Hmm...check out Silverlight :)

re: Order ticket online - multiple selection

Ok I found something Sooo cool that I think will solve your problem :)
Forget Silverlight

Check out Sprites :) :)

Let me know how this works out for you because I love it :)

It's simple, clean, works in many browsers (even the older ones) and doesn't require any crazy stuff like Silverlight, Flash, or other things.

It's sort of like image mapping but not.

Create a list <ul> and add your LinkButtons into the <li>'s.
Position the <ul> list to absolute...then apply the background image (being your seating plan) to the list. Use CSS to move the <li>'s to the correct positions on the seating plan map. Apply an background image to the <li>'s that makes them look like seats. When the user selects them, just change the image (sprite).


So Cool!
Check it out!

-Frinny

re: Order ticket online - multiple selection

If anyone is interested, here is the web site where I get the idea from:

http://www.gsc.com.my/rd/epayment_tutorial.asp

Check out the Seat Selection. It's the one related to my question here. Definitely very cool.

re: Order ticket online - multiple selection

I didn't see a seat selection component there.
Did you check out Sprites?