Question about PHP and static pages.

[Anon]

Hello all,

I have a question that someone will hopefully be able to answer.

I work at a government lab and am working on a bunch of pages for the physics Directorate.

We have an internal network behind a firewall that is only internally accessible and then an external network visible to everyone on the outside world.

I have written some PHP pages which query a MS SQL Server from a linux computer and that works fine.

My problem lies in the following.
part of my project involves mirroring all the possible pages that can be created from the database (personal pages for each employee) as static pages which reside on servers outside the fire wall.

My question is this. Right now I use PHP 4.x as an apache module but also have the CGI binary built. If I type "php filename" at the unix prompt it parses and evaluates the PHP code in the file, but suppose I need to pass the PHP page I'm parsing some arguements. Right now I have a php page that takes an employee number on the url line (If I use GET method) or it comes in through a post. I want to take this page I have already written and generate all possible html code that could result for all employee numbers I need to pass it one at a time.

Any one have any suggestions?

Thank you a lot for your time.
Sincerely,

-Joel Even
[e-mail]
-Student Intern, Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab
-Systems and Network Division under Physics
-Web and database development

[Anon]

What you should do is write a script that selects all the employe pages from the database, use the fopen, fwrite commands to write each instance to a file, you can write the HTML with the php variables. Then save each file as the employee's ID number so you have a unique filename, make sure you run that as a loop and it will output all the files for you. If you need any help, just e-mail me.

[Anon]

I'm not sure about this, but I think there may be an easier way to do this. I read somewhere that you can use some special functions in the output buffering functionality in PHP4 to change from standard output to a file. This way all you'd have to do is add a couple lines of code. The only problem is, there's no documentation for output buffering anywhere. If anyone knows where some is, PLEASE let us know.

[Anon]

The output buffering doesn't seem to be documented at php.net, but it is at zend.com:

http://www.zend.com/manual/function.ob-start.php

[Anon]

So you can definitly use output buffering to write the contents to a file instead of to the user. Just turn on output buffering, let the script run, get the contents of the buffer to a variable, write them to a file, and then empty your buffer, and output some message about success or info about the file made or something.