dynamic php

Anon

Please Help!!

I read an article that you can script dynamic data bases within an html page using php. (no data base program needed)

So, is it possible to create "reservation log.html" where clients select the available time.

By submitting their entry, the "reservationlog" file will update with the new entry.

Is this possible?

yelvington

Of course you can. Read the section of the manual that covers filesystem functions.

But there are distinct advantages to using a database, including ease of searching and sorting, insertion and deletion, record locking and updating. If you choose to use the filesystem instead of a database, in many situations you will be forced to reinvent the wheel.

Accepting user input and appending it to a file is trivial; see http://yelvington.com/annotate.php3 for a demonstration and sample code. However, the Web server must have permission to write to that location in the filesystem, which raises security issues.

Anon

Thanks a mil Steve.

I will attempt to build a res log with this information.

One thing though, where is the data stored in order to delete an entry?

yelvington

I don't quite understand the question, but I will guess.

If you store data by appending it to a file, you can't delete the data without opening the file for read/write, locking it so that nobody else can append to it, reading the entire file into memory, locating the item to be deleted, beginning and end, deleting it from the in-memory image, rewinding the file, writing the memory image in place of the old version, and closing the file. Locating the data requires that you invent some convention for delimiting the records (such as one line per record).

Sound messy? It is, and as I mentioned previously, updates and deletions are much easier with a real database.

If you store data by creating separate files for each record, then it's much easier to delete or change one. But if you want to create a unified report, you have to merge them together.

Why don't you just do this the right way, with a database? MySQL is free and it's already installed on most Web hosting services that support PHP.