Introduction

What is PHP DB Edit Toolkit?

How to use it

Data Dictionary

PHPDBEditTk's work is based on a so-called data dictionary, in which the tables in the database are defined again. The minimum data dictionary on which it will work, must contain at least one field, a primary key and the sort order:

$dbdef["table"] = array(
  "tablename" => "table",
  "pk" => "field",
  "fields" => array(
    "field" => array(
      "datatype" => "str",
      "disptype" => "str"
    )
  ),
  "sort_order" => array(
    "field"
  )
);

You'll see, that you also must specify the name of the database table ("tablename"). For working table view and form view processing, you must also specify the data type and the display type of the field. The data type is used to generate SQL statements, this is why there are three datatypes:

• "str" for anything in single quotes (strings and date/time)
• "int" for anything integer
• "flt" for anything floating point

There are the following display types:

• "static": the field is hidden, but gets transported
• "visiblestatic": for read-only fields - The field is hidden, but the content visible.
• "str" : for normal text fields
• "txtarea" : for a html textarea
• "file" : for a file upload box. The support is very rudimentary.

The views

There are basically 4 modes, which can be used to edit and display data with PHPDBEditTk:

• A tabular view, which displays rows from a database in a table. This is the typically the starting point for the user.
• A form view is used to edit a row of data.
• A detail view can be used to display more detail of a data row, if it doesn't fit in the tabular view.
• And finally there's a tabular form view, which can be used to edit multiple rows at once.

Another part is the handle_request function, which handles all database processing, the input checking and detail control flow. The top level control flow is currently outside the package and can be found inside the example application.

All actions and their parameters are transported by the URL/state management class sess_manager. This class basically allows to declare variables, which are transported over URL. You can then set these variables in a confortable way and build URLs from it. Another function reads the state of the incoming URL into the declared variables.

Tabular display

To generate a tabular display, we need to instantiate the generic admin class, tell it what table to display, run handle_request and build a tabular view from it:

$gadm = mediator::genericadmin();
$gadm->set_table("table");
$sess->alter_value("gadmaction", "gototabular");
$gadm->handle_request();
$tab = $gadm->build_tabular_display();
print $tab;

This will produce something like this, only that the picture is for a table with more fields (its taken from the downloadable sample application:

Form Display

Detail Display

Tabular Form Display