MySQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Introduction

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 ...