Visitor Care and Nursing Home Lists

Allowing Visitors to Save Personal Lists

Our  most recent release has added support for allowing visitors to save care homes and agencies to their own personal list of homes which can then be compared and viewed at a later date.

Saving Lists

To save a home the visitor clicks the Save Home link highlighted red in the screen shot below this link has an onclick handler registered to run the add method which contains the JavaScript for saving.

Town Listing with Save Link

HomeList.js provides all the client side functionality we need and it is this class which implements the add method mentioned above. We also make use of an external class name uuid.core.js which we use to generate a UUID for each visitor.

Our UUID uses version 4 of the UUID specification which can be found here we decided to use an existing implementation because if you look at the code I dont think it can be done any better.

We save this UUID in a cookie for two months and all homes added to a visitor list are deleted after seven days. Another constraint we have is that a visitor can only save 20 items to their list.

Listing Page with Save Link

Visitors can also add homes to their list from the actual listing page of the home which is highlighted red in the picture above.

Viewing Lists

Visitors can view their own lists by clicking the View Saved Homes link which is located in the top left corner of all pages and is highlighted red in the screen shot below. This link uses the top and right CSS properties with a position of absolute.

The current version only allows certain comparisons but we plan on increasing what you can compare and also select only what you want to see in later versions.

Visitor List

Conclusion

This feature has already been well accepted by our visitors and we are currently monitoring its usage and hope to improve the service even more in the future.

We also released a number of other features with this release and we will be writing about them in future postings so stay tuned.