Uk Postcode lookup field with covering a range of districts

Need some efficient solution of district range se开发者_如何学Clector for an area in UK. Lets say I selected Manchester which covers many small districts like M1,M2,M3.....M20, M30... My users can be sharing responsibility of some of the districts of Manchester like from M1 to M10 and another user with M11 to M21. Also they can have multiple areas like Manchester(M), Aberdeen(AB) and so on and the range will be needed even then.

How to develop the interface for it so that it should create minimum load on mysql DB as well as handy for user to add a lots of areas with their desired district range.

All selected range postcodes will be added in DB and postcode info will be matched against each one so that the person responsible can be referenced.

For more idea: http://screencast.com/t/6qwCVhKA

thanks in advance

It sounds like you should be breaking the postcodes down into area, district and sector. So you have

area | district | sector
------------------------
M    | M1       | M1 0AA
M    | M2       | M2 0AA
M    | M3       | M3 0AA

etc, this will enable you to reference by whatever level you want.

It's described in more detail on page 17 of this and on wikipedia, which is actually very accurate.