tjameswhite.com

I finally cracked the last nut. My first PHP-powered program is up and running. I now have a database driven Wish List.
It isn’t perfect, but it works. Currently it just displays the list of items in the order they were entered, with a bit of formating to make it all look nice. The final piece that put it all together was figuring out what the Resource ID # meant. I would run a query and the output would be “Resource ID #5″. Not helpful. With some reading on the PHP website I found I had to use a slightly different command to display the actual content of a query. Once done, presto!, everything worked.

Now that I’ve got something basic and functional, I’ll set to work on making it cooler. I’d like it to display the wish list items grouped by category, and to make it even more dynamic where you could select categories, people, items or any combination therein. I’ll start with just organizing by category.

My coworker showed me the basics for what I need to do to accomplish that. Basically, right now the script runs a few simple queries, one after another. What I need to do is construct a much more complicated ‘join’ query to get all the data at once and sort if from there.

It make sense, but it’s going to take me a while to actually figure out the syntax. Oh, and it will pretty much mean rewriting my whole script (which is no big deal – it’s only about 50 lines).