how does dynamic generation work

Anon

Hello, I am new to PHP, so I apologize if this question is very vague. I have tried to be as clear as I can.

How does the dynamic generation of pages work? For example, I was browsing through the code snippets area on this page. The URL reads something like: www.phpbuilder.com/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=SOME_NUMBER.

In the above URL, how does the detail.php page know which arguments have been passed to it, and what action to take based on that argument? When I viewed the source, I did not see anything that would evaluate the argument and then display a page based on that - in fact I didn't see any php code at all. What kind of code would do this and why doesn't it show up on that HTML page?

Thanks very much.

Prasanna

http://www.bananachipsonline.com

dolphinsnot

ummmm....well, first off, php is a server-side scripting language...errors aside, you will never find the source code to a php file...

in the example you gave, detail.php is passed a variable $type with a value of 'snippet' and a variable $id with a value of 'SOME_NUMBER'.

All the logic on how to handle these variables and values is in the detail.php script.

java-script is client-side...you see it in the source code, it hogs the end user's resources to execute, and is succeptable to all the troubles with cross-platform compatability...

php is server-side. your scripts live on your web server, are run by your web server.

you really need to do some more research....i'm not going to spend hours explaining this stuff to you. i learned it all by myself, and so can you.

www.hotscripts.com - download some php programs and read the code
www.php.net - the 'official' php site. read the manual.
www.google.com - use a search engine!

-dolphinsnot

Anon

Well, the basic princible behind dynamic generation is to over come the limitation of HTML which isn't a programming language but simply a presentation language. You will never see the souce code to a PHP page as the source code behind it (actual programming) is executed and plain html output is sent to the client.

The querystrings you are refering to the values being passed referer to a set of data in a warehouse data when the page is triggered the data is collect and then presented to the client in HTML format.