In last week’s lesson, we looked at the variables and methods we would need to interact with the advertising database tables. This week, we’ll examine the code for the data object class file and how the other parts of the site will use these methods. First, we include the database connection string information. This information includes the database server name, cursor location and other pertinent information. Since this information is used throughout the site, it is usually stored in a separate...
In our last session, we looked at the process of entering information on ad banners and ad clients, as well as generating ad activity reports. This week, we examine how to retrieve a random banner ad. We will also learn how to delete, activate and deactivate ads and clients. The getRandomAd() function retrieves a random ad by using the PHP rand() function. The function returns the ad’s primary key ID, client ID, title, URL and redirect path. The function also updates the activity table for this banner...
MySQL stored procedure's come in really handy at times. I like to let the database do the work for me sometimes. For example, in an e-commerce system you may need to calculate a tax. For our example today though, we will use the tables we made in my previous article on the XREF table. We are going to focus this tutorial on getting the appropriate tables in place to preform our history logging. To start, we are going to create a module's table so that our history table can be one table instead of many and we are...
In the last piece on our PHP online user poll, we look at the administrative service and how the site supervisor enters, deletes and manages the poll data. The first poll administrative page checks if the administrator is logged in. You can choose from Session variables or Cookies to check the site administrator login status. Once the application has confirmed the identity of the site administrator, the page lists the available polls. The first step is to use the class methods and variables in the class.polls.php...
So far in this series, we have developed the data layer (database tables) and the business layer (PHP methods) for manipulating the data. In this piece, we will look at the presentation layer that is used to display the poll question and poll results. The HTML header will check for the presence of a cookie (in case the user has voted previously) and refresh the page if it has timed out. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">...
User surveys can be an extremely effective marketing tool for any business web site. Visitors can make their voices heard on what products, services and information they would like the site to provide. Site owners can then adjust their marketing plans and promotions around the results of these polls. In order to build a basic user poll, we must first create the database tables that will hold the poll question and its various responses. Create the MySQL Polls Table ... First, we must build a database table...