Basic Web Application ( Week 8 )

1. Installaion
( How to Install PHP and MySQL Under Windows XP )
http://heliotropicsystems.com/pubs/TSa092005.pdf
http://www.builderau.com.au/program/mysql/print.htm?TYPE=story&AT=339271632-
339028784t-320002018c
( How to configure LAMP )
http://lamphowto.com/
http://www.mysql-apache-php.com/

There are good sources to help installing LAMP and WAMP.

2. PHP Configuration (php.ini)
Sometimes, We need to modify this file to set up our system. Because PHP stores
all kinds of configuration in this file. This file is in the directory where we
installed PHP.

Following is good source to understand how to use php.ini file
http://www.washington.edu/computing/web/publishing/php-ini.html

3. Uploading Files to MySQL Database
This is very interesting skill and sometimes very useful.. So, I wanna mention
here.
Using PHP to upload files into MySQL database sometimes needed by some web
application. For instance for storing pdf documents or image.

A. First, Make the teable for the upload files
id, name, type, size, content

We can use one of three BLOB data types for column content.
They are TINYBLOB, BLOB, MEDIUMBLOB, and LONGBLOB

BLOB is limited to store up to 64 kilobytes of data and MEDIUMBLOB is to store
up to 16 megabytes.

( Example )
CREATE TABLE upload (
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
type VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
size INT NOT NULL,
content MEDIUMBLOB NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(id)
);

B. Second, uploading a file to MYSQL DB.
uploading the file to the server then read the file and insert it to MySQL.

Using post method, and then using file as input type. Bellow is the example

And then we can use $_FILES to upload the file to MySQL

$_FILES['userfile']['name']
$_FILES['userfile']['type']
$_FILES['userfile']['size']
$_FILES['userfile']['tmp_name']
$_FILES['userfile']['error']

Following is the example of uploading the file to MySQL

$fileName = $_FILES['userfile']['name'];
$tmpName = $_FILES['userfile']['tmp_name'];
$fileSize = $_FILES['userfile']['size'];
$fileType = $_FILES['userfile']['type'];

$fp = fopen($tmpName. 'r');
$content = fread($fp, filesize($tmpName));
$content = addslashes($content);
fclose($fp);

$query = "INSERT INTO upload (name, size, type, content) VALUES
('$fileName', '$fileSize', '$fileType', '$content')";

mysql_query($query) or die ('Error, query failed');

Wow! I'm feeling there are so many interesting techniques in PHP+MySQL....
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