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[56K WARN] PHP, MySQL and dynamic HTML

Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 11:15 am
by tristanlee85
This might sound a little confusing, but I'll try to explain it as best as possible. At FedEx, my job is to do loader evaluations weekly to give the loader feedback. It's an annoyance to go through every week and fill out 25 different papers of evaluations. So, I've been looking to make things easier. What I did for now was I scanned the evaluation paper and imported it into a Word document. I added special fields over top of the image that allows me to type in text in the specific locations above the image. Basically like this:

Image

In that document, every time I open it, the date updates itself. That's nifty and all, but I'm interested in a more productive way of doing things rather than have the 25 different images load up in this 400MB Word document.

Here is my idea. I would like to create a PHP script that posts into my MySQL database. There will be 4 fields: name, date, sort, comments. I'd like to be able to post that information into a databse and then create another page that will get the information from the database and place it over the image in absolute positions using dynamic HTML. If someone can thing of a better way other than HTML, excellent. I'd be glad to try it.

I'm sure this sounds a little confusing so ask questions if you need. I'm not looking for someone to do the scripts for me because I want to learn how to do this on my own. I just kind of need a starting point and understand how to put and get information from a database.

Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 11:26 am
by JayBird
id look into writing the data to a PDF with php

do a search for fpdf

Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 2:13 pm
by feyd
I couldn't agree more with Pimptastic here.

Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 6:27 pm
by tristanlee85
Alright. I downloaded that. I talked to one of my employees today at work who uses PHP a lot and he laughed at me when I asked him how to do such thing. He was like "yeh, you're trying to do the basics..." So, he told me to check out http://www.phpforms.net and I did. It seems I have to pay for the software so that's out of the question. I did get the fPDF though. Exactly what steps must I take to submit (2) arrays: name and comments? How about getting the text out of the database to display into fPDF?