Chapter 17. Incorporating Query Resultsinto Web Pages
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 query 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. It 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.)
The recipes here build on the techniques shown in Chapter 16 for generating web pages from scripts and for encoding output for display. See that chapter if you need some background in these topics.
The scripts from which the examples in this chapter are drawn can be
found in the recipes distribution under ...