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SRMV College ERP: The Library Module

A modular PHP and MySQL ERP for a college, one folder per department. My part was the library: masters for books, locations, publishers and vendors, issue and return, and server-side tables that stay fast as the catalogue grows.

Role: Built the library module in a team ERP

Period: Jan 2023 – Apr 2023

PHP
MySQL
Bootstrap

Every library system has to answer a simple question first: which book is where, and who has it?

The problem

The ERP for Sri Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya College of Arts and Science was split into modules: attendance, examinations, fees, hostel, internal marks, students, transport, and the library. Each needed its own screens on a shared base.

It was a mini project for the college, built for the college and its staff.

What I built

The whole ERP follows one pattern. Each module is a folder with its own dashboard and pages, sharing a common header, sidebar, database connection, query helpers and paging code.

College_ERP/
 ├─ includes/common  config · connection · db functions · paging
 ├─ attendance/  examination/  fees_collection/  hostel/
 ├─ internal_marks/  students/  transport/
 └─ library/   ← mine
     ├─ masters: books · locations · publishers · vendors
     ├─ issue / return
     └─ datatable/: books, vendors, student lookup (server-side)

The library module:

  • Masters for books, shelf locations, publishers and vendors, each with an add/edit form and a list.
  • Issue and return, with a lookup that fetches the borrower's name from their student number.
  • Server-side data tables for books and vendors, so a list pages and searches on the database instead of loading the whole catalogue into the browser.
  • The database tables for library transactions.

Decisions that mattered

Server-side paging from the start. A book list is the one table in a college system guaranteed to keep growing. Paging and searching in SQL keeps the page fast whether there are a hundred books or fifty thousand.

Masters before transactions. Locations, publishers and vendors came first, so every book record points at real rows instead of free text that drifts.

What was hard

Merging into a shared codebase. Several people's modules came together in one repository in February, and the commits after that are database fixes and layout alignment.

Where it stands

Twenty commits between January and April 2023, nearly all of them mine (through two of my accounts).

The repository is private; it includes real student data, which stays out of this write-up.

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