[RESOLVED] Confirm my thought process for me?

dapuxter

So, I'm a total PHP newbie. I work for a small company and one of my duties is to track outages of service. My boss wants to have a web page people can go to to see current outages and the previous day's outages. Somehow, this managed to get dumped in my lap instead of someone with more programming experience. I'm taking it as a learning experience and running with it though. (It helps that my boss told me that if I do well on this that when we launch our entire web presence I get to pretty much retire from my other duties and just manage our web site.)

Anyway... We have on average 3-5 things per day that we need to track and we already have a database system in place for long term tracking. All this web app needs to do is: 1. Be updated by a form that myself and two other people will have access to, 2. Display all current outages in a nice, neat, tabular format, 3. In the future, have a one day history built in to keep track of the previous day as well. Right now, I'm just worried about 1 and 2. I have the form designed, and am starting on the php part.

In the beginning, its just going to be very bare bones. I'll manually edit to update as for closed/open tickets. I basically just want the form to save multiple entries and then display all the entries in a table. Since its a very small amount of data that needs to be tracked, I plan on using a text file to store the data. There are eight values coming from the form of varying types. I plan on using file_put_contents to write the text file, and then another script will read the text file and build the table.

My main question is: Am I going about this the right way? I don't have the option of using SQL or any other database to begin with, that will come later if needed. Any input is certainly appreciated. I'm catching on quickly, but would just like some feedback from experienced php coders and I know none personally. Thanks!

NogDog

...I don't have the option of using SQL or any other database to begin with, that will come later if needed....

Well, as I was reading your post, the first thing that started to go through my mind was the database design that would support this. So my thought process on this would be to make the database happen now instead of later. It will make life much simpler in the long run, in that it can allow you to simply do things like grabbing all outages from yesterday and sort them by time, or severity, or any other desired criteria that you track. Plus it gives you lots of future capbability, like if the boss comes by and asks, "Do you have any idea how many outages we had in March?" and you run a quick query and say, "Yes, we had 22 serverity 1 outages and 13 severity 2's."

dapuxter

Well, we already have that feature in another program, so there's no point re-inventing the wheel as they say. That program has the capability of outputting a report as a web page, but its a very ponderous process and doesn't allow for any formatting whatsoever. Since this web page is intended for folks to whom appearance means everything and sensibility next to nothing, we need a quick, easy, pretty solution.

NogDog

dapuxter wrote:
Well, we already have that feature in another program, so there's no point re-inventing the wheel as they say. That program has the capability of outputting a report as a web page, but its a very ponderous process and doesn't allow for any formatting whatsoever. Since this web page is intended for folks to whom appearance means everything and sensibility next to nothing, we need a quick, easy, pretty solution.

Does that other program use a database? If so, can you access it via the program you want to create?

dapuxter

Not at first. It's hosted off site by our main office and they have very stringent security requirements. We can get access to it, but it will take time and chances are, take the control of the project out of our hands.

dapuxter

Ok, I think I'm making some serious headway, but I need to ask what I think is a stupid question. I want to take my post data and store it as another variable, so that its available globally and I can then use it to build my arrays for the text file. How do I do that? I've tried $varname=$_POST["varname"] but that doesn't seem to work.

Edit: Alright, I'm getting there I think. I have my code writing a serialized and encoded string to a text file. The next step is seeing if I can then unencode, unserialize, and then format. Thanks for the help, Nogdog!

NogDog

If you want to re-use values between a series of pages, you might want to use PHP sessions, storing the values of interest in the $SESSION array (don't forget you'll need to do a session_start() on each page before you access the $SESSION array). If you need a more permanent sort of persistence, then you may need to write the data to a file or database. In that case, you might want to user [man]serialize/man/[man]unserialize/man

dapuxter

Hey, I'm proud of myself! I figured out the serialize() and encode() thing without seeing your reply. I'm calling it a night for now, I've been staring at code so long my contacts are shriveled little husks. Thanks again for all the help!