USING DATABASES AND

HANDLING XML
 INTRODUCTION

 Relational databases are central to most of the commercial

Web development
 Databases are used to store, manage and efficiently query
large volumes of data
 They are complex pieces of software built on a relatively
simple programming model
 Let us look at some of the database facilities which can be
used by PHP
 NEED FOR WEB SERVERS

 Need of web servers

 Large scale Web systems are most often based on J2EE
 A version of Java which has the features to run enterprise systems
 J2EE is massively complex once it tires to be all things to all enterprises
 Small organizations often use Microsoft products, uses .NET framework
 It is rich and powerful but not fully featured asJ2EE
 Disadvantages
 Both are proprietary
 Aimed at business developers
 Have problems of complexity and bloat
 Popular open source alternatives
 Running on GNU / Linux OS
 Apache Web server
 MySQL database
 Use of one popular programming languages PHP / Perl / Python
 LAMP

 The suite of technologies

 Popular both together and individually
 Installed free of charges
 INTRODUCTION TO MYSQL

 A great success story of open-source

 Resource at www.mysql.com
 Been around for a decade
 Software downloaded over 100 million times
 MySQL is overloaded – indicated two meanings
 Database engine
 Database software
 USING MYSQL

 Relational databases are manipulated using a language called

SQL
 SQL commands can be used both from the MySQL interface
and from within PHP scripts
 SQL scripts are not case sensitive
 Commands end with a semicolon, but not when inside PHP
code

 SHOW DATABASES;
 Lists all of the databases which are available on the system
 USE name
 Selects one the available databases
 CREATE DATABASE name
 Creates an empty database with the name, supplied as parameter
 DROP DATABASE name
 Deletes the named database
 CREATE TABLE
 DELETE TABLE
 COMMONLY USED DATABASE

 BOOLEAN – non-zero values are true and zero is false

 INTEGER [UNSIGNED] – holds integer values in the range of
+ / - 231
 MEDIUM INT – holds integer values in the range of + / - 2 2 3 ,
unsigned integers can range from 0 to 2 3 4
 DOUBLE[(m,b)]- is a double precision floating point number
accurate to 15 decimal places, if “m” is specified in parentheses it
indicates the display width of the number, “ b” represents the
precision
 DECIMAL[(m,b)] [UNSIGNED] – indicates a decimal number, m gives
the total number if digits, “d” the number of decimals
 DATE – a date in YYYY-MM-DD format
 CHAR – an ASCII character
 VARCHAR(m) – is a variable length using “m” gives the length of the
string in the range of 1 to 255
 TEXT – a piece of text of max. length 65535 characters
 ENUM(‘value’, [,’value2’[,……….,]]) an enumeration, a comma-
separated list of values, columns must take one of these values
 ACCESSING MYSQL FROM PHP

 Using and accessing database is a very complex activity

 Let us consider a simple application which store name, email
address and role taken from a drop down list.
 Data is entered in an HTML form
 User queries the database, delete or amend the existing
records and add new data
 KICK STARTING THE APPLICATION

1. Connection to the database

<?php
$db = mysqli_connect (‘localhost’, ‘username’, ‘password’,
‘database’);
if(!$db)
{
die(unable to connect to the database”,
mysqli_connect_error());
}
?>
2. Handling form elements
function handleForm()
{
$firstname =$_POST[‘firstname’];
$lastname = $_POST[‘lastname’];
$email = $_POST[‘email’];
$role = $_POST[‘role’];
}
 OTHER METHODS

 mysqli_query(database,statement)
 mysqli_fetch_object(result)
 mysqli_fetch_row(result)
 mysqli_fetch_array(result,type)
 WHAT IS XML

 The XML language is a way to structure data for sharing

across websites.
 Several web technologies like RSS Feeds and Podcasts are
written in XML.
 XML is easy to create. It looks a lot like HTML, except that you
make up your own tags.
 WHAT IS AN XML PARSER?

 To read and update, create and manipulate an XML document,

you will need an XML parser.
 In PHP there are two major types of XML parsers:
 Tree-Based Parsers
 Event-Based Parsers
 TREE-BASED PARSER

 Tree-based parsers holds the entire document in Memory

and transforms the XML document into a Tree structure
 It analyzes the whole document, and provides access to
the Tree elements (DOM)
 This type of parser is a better option for smaller XML
documents, but not for large XML document as it causes
major performance issues
 Example of tree-based parsers:
 SimpleXML
 DOM
 EVENT-BASED PARSERS

 Event-based parsers do not hold the entire document in

Memory, instead, they read in one node at a time and allow
you to interact with in real time
 Once you move onto the next node, the old one is thrown away
 This type of parser is well suited for large XML documents. It
parses faster and consumes less memory
 Example of event-based parsers:
 XMLReader
 XML Expat Parser
 HANDLING XML

 PHP has an excellent facilities for manipulating XML

 By default this language includes the expat processor library
written by James Clark (This feature can be disabled during
the compilation of PHP)
 Expat based processing is quite hard to work with
 Its underlying library provides raw access to the XML document
 Developers need to write functions which look for elements in the
XML document, extract and manipulate their attributes
 PHP WITH DOM

 Document Object Model (DOM) provides a uniform interface to XML

documents
 DOM can be useful when you are creating XML documents in programs
as includes methods to create , add and validate documents
 A DOM implementation is available in PHP5
 PHP 4 has same facilities in an extension called as DOM XML
 DOM extensions give access to an API which implements DOM Level 2
through the Object Oriented interfaces
 Here the API is very low-level

 Note:
 Most programmers do not need all of the facilities of DOM implementation and
do not want to work at the level of a raw XML
 They need a nice, clean interface which lets them to extract the information
from the XML documents
 PHP 5 includes a extension called a SimpleXML to load and access the XML
documents
 SIMPLE XML

 SimpleXML is a PHP extension that allows us to easily

manipulate and get XML data.
 simplexml_load_string(string)
 If the parameter is a string which represents an XML document this
method returns an object of type SimpleXMLElement
 The properties of the returned object have the name of the elements
from the XML and contain their data, attributes or children
 In case the parameter string cannot be formatted as an object of the
SimpleXMLElement type , then the Boolean value false is returned
 The contents of SimpleXMLElement object can be displayed using the
standard PHP var_dump() method
 PHP SIMPLEXML - GET NODE VALUES

 Get the node values from the “ data.xml" file:

 Example
 <?php
$xml=simplexml_load_file(“data.xml") or die("Error:
Cannot create object");
echo $xml->to . "<br>";
echo $xml->from . "<br>";
echo $xml->heading . "<br>";
echo $xml->body;
?>
 BOOKS.XML

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<bookstore>
  <book category="COOKING">
    <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
    <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
    <year>2005</year>
    <price>30.00</price>
  </book>
  <book category="CHILDREN">
    <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
    <author>J K. Rowling</author>
    <year>2005</year>
    <price>29.99</price>
  </book>
 </bookstore>
<?php
$xml=simplexml_load_file("books.xml") or die("Error:
Cannot create object");
echo $xml->book[0]->title . "<br>";
echo $xml->book[1]->title; 
?>
 OTHER FUNCTIONS

 simplexml_import_dom(object)
 If the script contains an XML document as a DOM object, this
method will load the properties of that object into a
SimpleXMLElement object
 simplexml_load_file(URI)
 Generally the XML data in the script is a sting or a DOM object
 Sometimes we want to load a file which contains the XML at
runtime
 The file may be available on the local filesystem or remotely via a
URL
 This method encapsulates all of the functionality which is needed
to find and import the file and to create the SimpleXMLElement
object
 If the loading or importing the data fails the method returns false
 The underlying implementation uses the Libxml 2 library
 SimpleXMLElement->asXML()
 It takes the properties of the SimpleXMLElement object and
returns an XML document which contains them
 SimpleXMLElement ->attributes()
 Returns the attributes of the object if any, these can be iterated
across using a foreach loop
 SimpleXMLElement->children()
 Returns the children, if any, of the object so that they can be
iterated across
 SimpleXMLElement->xpath(expression)
 This method accepts an Xpath expression as its parameter
 The element is evaluated against the expression
 The result is returned as an array of SimpleXMLElement object
END of PHP