Javascript web content filtering

Question

Hello,

I am trying to build a filterable listing of Resumes for a Club website that I work on. My goal is to be able to a all the resumes (in PDF) in a folder on the web server. I would Then like to offer the option for a user to generate a listing of Names with associated Link to the PDF document Like

"Name Resume Link"
"Name2 ...." etc

However I would like give drop down menus to select a filter type (by Major, Minor, Graduation Year, etc) And then depending on what filter type is selected to give a listing of all possible choices to filter by. Then I would like to find all related resumes in my folder of resumes and populate a listing (preferrable with some nice formatting so each line has a subtle alternating background color).

I haven't really worked with JavaScript much. So my main questions are:

1) How do I search the PDFs for criteria (do I need to tag them in some way?, as a note, the resumes are not formatted the same, as one would expect)
2) Do I need to populate a Table with information in some way? I found a website showing me how to populate an (un)ordered list with javascript but that was with one dropdown and predefined values.

Sorry for the novel. Any help will be and is appreciated. I have worked with HTML and Java a lot. But really never JavaScript.

Thanks, Ross

website: www.indiana.edu/~blsc

Answer 1

JavaScript is a Client-Side programming language, but the PDFs sit on the server, so they can't be searched with JavaScript unless your web page provides meta information to the page in some way already.