When you
store information in your database, you can easily
retrieve it for use on the Web in a variety of ways. Query results can
be displayed as unstructured paragraphs or as structured elements such
as lists or tables; you can display static text or create hyperlinks.
Query metadata can be useful when formatting query results, too, such as
when generating an HTML table that displays a result set and uses its
metadata to get the column headings for the table. These tasks combine
statement processing with web scripting, and are primarily a matter of
properly encoding any special characters in the results (like &
or <
) and adding the appropriate HTML tags for
the types of elements you want to produce.
This chapter shows how to generate several types of web output from query results:
Paragraphs
Lists
Tables
Hyperlinks
Navigation indexes (single- and multiple-page)
The chapter also covers techniques for inserting binary data into your database and for retrieving and transferring that kind of information to clients. (It’s easiest and most common to work with text for creating web pages from database content, but you can also use MySQL to help service requests for binary data such as images, sounds, or PDF files.) You can also serve query results for download rather than for display in a page. Finally, the chapter discusses the use of template packages for generating web pages.
The recipes here build on the techniques shown in Chapter 17 for generating web pages from scripts and for encoding output for display. See that chapter if you need background in these topics.
Scripts to create the tables used in this chapter are located in
the tables directory of the
recipes
distribution. The scripts for
the examples can be found under the directories named for the servers
used to run them. For Perl, Ruby, PHP, and Python examples, look under
the apache directory. Utility
routines used by the example scripts are found in files located in the
lib directory. (See Using Apache to Run Web Scripts for information on configuring
Apache so that scripts can be run by it and find their library files.)
For Java (JSP) examples, look under the tomcat directory; you should already have
installed these in the process of setting up the mcb
application context (Using Tomcat to Run Web Scripts).
Note that although the scripts in this chapter are intended to be invoked from your browser after they have been installed, many of them (JSP pages excepted) can also be invoked from the command line if you want to see the raw HTML they produce (Using Apache to Run Web Scripts).
Not all languages are represented in every section of this
chapter. If a particular section has no example for a language in which
you’re interested, check the recipes
distribution. It might contain the implementation you want, even if it’s
not shown here.
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