Tag Archives: PHP

google charts using mysql recordset made easy

General

if your programming skills are limited, then you could use the below code to integrate google charts to your intranet or internet web site.

As i first step  i usually visit the the google charts page and select a chart that matches my desired outcome. Lets say that we have a list of cd collections that we want to process and we need to know graphically how many we have already processed or not. For that i would choose a pie chart.

Mysql Part

Next we need to retrieve the necessary data from the database using the appropriate query.

mysql_query

mysql_queryIn my case i only need to have two columns, one that shows the cd collection visibility type (1=visible, 0= hidden, 3=other status), and the count of each type of visibility.

PHP Part

Next, the php part of the mysql connection:

mysql_select_db($database_localhost, $localhost);
$query_Recordset1 = "select count(*) as count,visible from cdcollection where type=1 and serial=1 group by visible";
$Recordset1 = mysql_query($query_Recordset1, $localhost) or die(mysql_error());
$row_Recordset1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($Recordset1);
$totalRows_Recordset1 = mysql_num_rows($Recordset1);

then we transform the data to an array format:

$data[0] = array('visible','count'); 
 for ($i=1; $i<($totalRows_Recordset1+1); $i++)
 {
 $data[$i] = array(mysql_result($Recordset1, $i-1,'visible'),
 (int) mysql_result($Recordset1, $i-1, 'count'));
 }

Google Charts Script

The below script should be included in the <head> of your document in order to initialize the google charts library.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>

Then right below add the following script part, which basically transform  the data array to json and then it uses it to create the chart.

<script type="text/javascript"> 
google.load("visualization", "1", {packages:["corechart"]});
google.setOnLoadCallback(drawChart1);
function drawChart1() {
var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(<?php echo json_encode($data)?>);

 var options = {
 title: 'Collections',
 hAxis: {title: 'Year', titleTextStyle: {color: 'red'}},
 colors: ['#e0440e', '#e6693e', '#ec8f6e', '#f3b49f', '#f6c7b6']
 };


var chart = new google.visualization.PieChart(document.getElementById('chart_div1'));
 chart.draw(data, options);
</script>

I am explaining the red parts of the above code:

  • The json_encode($data) part transform the $data array to json. So in the mysql part if you used some other name for your dataset it should also be changed here.
  • The part right after “var options = {  “ includes all the settings of the chart. This is where you specify the title, the colour style, the fonts etc. Depending on what you need to do adequate documentation exists on the net..
  • Finally, the last red part PieChart is where you tell the api what chart you need it to render. This could be modified to ColumnChart or Histogram or any other form the available options you can find in the google chart development page.

See below the dashboard i have create for my self using three different recordsets.

My Google Charts Dashboard
My Google Charts Dashboard

output_buffering in Wamp causing issues in the insert form

As mentioned earlier this week i changed my development machine to newer vmware win 7. During this, also upgraded from Wamp 2.2 to Wamp 2.5. Fortunatelly, i still keep both environments in parallel since various issues come up.

One of these issues is the one found today in php form (created with the dreamweaver CC wizard) that inserts some values into a mysql table. In my new dev machine i got these errors:

apache erros

The old dev environment worked fine, the prod environment worked fine, the new dev threw errors.

I started by trying to find any compatibility issues in the PHP versions between Wamp Server 2.2 and 2.5, could not locate anything.

The solution came from the Stack Exchange (again). It appears that the php.ini on the new server came with the default value of

output_buffering = 4096

which should be changed to

output_buffering = on

which was the default on the old dev machine. To change the value in Wamp server just go to PHP menu and edit the php.ini to the mentioned value.

wamp.2.5

One alternative suggested by lots of people, which i did not try was to add

ob_start();

at the beggining of the script, which turns on the output buffering feature for the specific script.

published date meta data from mysql timestamp

I am using the timestamp data type in mysql to keep track of when each row has been modified or inserted.

CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

This saves the date in the database in the form of: 2015-11-24 13:55:10

I need to have a timestamp though, that will be used in the meta tags and will be in the following form :

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2013-09-17T05:59:00+01:00" />

as advised by opengraph guidelines. Googling a lot, and the following are the two candidates on which i ended up to:

date(DATE_ATOM, strtotime($row_getPost['blogpostimestamp']));

which echoes 2015-11-23T15:27:01+00:00

and

date('Y-m-dTH:i:s.uZ',strtotime($row_getPost['blogpostimestamp']));

whch echoes 2015-11-23UTC15:27:01.00

The latter also includes the server timezone.

An alternative to this would be to convert the timestamp, during the query phase, which from what i read is not suggested, and of course did not work for me. Conversion in the php code allows you to use the timestamp with multiple forms in the same page e.g in meta and on footer notifying when this was published and by whom.

 

 

PHP- Mysql database encoding and question-marks in the text (and how to get rid of them)

For my developing project i use Mysql and Dreamweaver set up with Wamp. I would say that i very familiar with databases and how to handle data etc..

Prerequisites to this project was that i could not modify either my php.ini or mysql.ini, since i am on a shared hosting plan.

One issue I had and could not fix though was that i got question-marks  for special characters like quotes or Cyrillic or French characters using ascent. I did work on this many hours but with no luck. Today i finally have managed to solve it. Here is how:

Since all my databases already have data and are online, i created copies of them using the correct charset. So:

1. I Exported all the tables in my databases using mysqldump and recreated them using utf8  character set and utf8_unicode_ci table/column collation. This is essential to make sure all data are saved in the correct format

2. I made sure that all my pages had the following two meta tags in the head tag:

<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

3. Finally, and that is what was missing all this time, is to make sure that all communication with the database is done through UTF. Apparently this does not happen automatically when you set the php encoding and the database collation/encoding. To do so, every time you query your database,  you need to specify the communication  encoding format.

mysql_select_db($database_localhost, $localhost);

$query_collections = sprintf("Select  * from table WHERE packbrand=%s and serial='1' AND VISIBLE='1' order by collection asc", GetSQLValueString($colname_collections, "text"));

mysql_query("set names 'utf8'");

This  last part basically fixed it.

What did not work for me:

  • Trying to figure our whether your text editor (like notepad++) is wrongly converting your query to a different encoding.
  •  Pass the set names command in mysql workbench. While typing this i am just now realizing that this would not make any difference on way or an other, because it is the retrieval of the data in PHP that caused issues and not the displaying or the typing in..

One down many to go. Move to next project.

Sitemap & Sitemap Index xml files using php and mysql

For some time now I have been generating sitemap xml files for google submission using Microsoft Excel. Always knew that there would be a way to generate it on the fly/on request and never bother with that again. But how?

Documentation is not very clear because you need to use multiple programming languages, and also because the whole xml validation process seems very sensitive to errors. Since i am not an experienced programmer, stack exchange became my guide and i have finally managed to do it.

If you have multiple pages, you probably need to create intermediate xmlindex pages. These are basically specially marked index files that point to other index files. Warning: Nested xmlindex files are not allowed by Google (even though are at the end followed and indexed).

<?php Header('Content-type: text/xml');

require_once('../Connections/localhost.php'); 

if (!function_exists("GetSQLValueString")) {
function GetSQLValueString($theValue, $theType, $theDefinedValue = "", $theNotDefinedValue = "") 
{
 if (PHP_VERSION < 6) {
 $theValue = get_magic_quotes_gpc() ? stripslashes($theValue) : $theValue;
 }

 $theValue = function_exists("mysql_real_escape_string") ? mysql_real_escape_string($theValue) : mysql_escape_string($theValue);

 switch ($theType) {
 case "text":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? "'" . $theValue . "'" : "NULL";
 break; 
 case "long":
 case "int":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? intval($theValue) : "NULL";
 break;
 case "double":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? doubleval($theValue) : "NULL";
 break;
 case "date":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? "'" . $theValue . "'" : "NULL";
 break;
 case "defined":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? $theDefinedValue : $theNotDefinedValue;
 break;
 }
 return $theValue;
}
}

mysql_select_db($database_localhost, $localhost);
$query_Recordset1 = "select * from sitemaps where `use`='sitemap'";
$Recordset1 = mysql_query($query_Recordset1, $localhost) or die(mysql_error());
$row_Recordset1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($Recordset1);
$totalRows_Recordset1 = mysql_num_rows($Recordset1);
$xml=new SimpleXMLElement('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>'
 .'<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">'
 .'</sitemapindex>'); 
do { $url=$xml->addChild('sitemap');
 $website="http://www.tharsitis.gr/".strtolower(str_replace(' ','-',$row_Recordset1['url']));
 $url->addChild('loc',$website);
 "<br/>";
 //$url->addChild('lastmod','XXXXXXXX'); OPTIONAL
 } while ($row_Recordset1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($Recordset1));
mysql_free_result($Recordset1);
print($xml->asXML());
?>

This is the xml sitemap  index code that worked for me. I created the database recordset using Dreamweaver. It retrieves all the xml index urls from Mysql database.

At the second part of the project i needed to generate the sitemap xml files that the xml index would be point at.

This is the code that worked for me:

<?php Header('Content-type: text/xml');

require_once('../Connections/localhost.php'); 

if (!function_exists("GetSQLValueString")) {
function GetSQLValueString($theValue, $theType, $theDefinedValue = "", $theNotDefinedValue = "") 
{
 if (PHP_VERSION < 6) {
 $theValue = get_magic_quotes_gpc() ? stripslashes($theValue) : $theValue;
 }

 $theValue = function_exists("mysql_real_escape_string") ? mysql_real_escape_string($theValue) : mysql_escape_string($theValue);

 switch ($theType) {
 case "text":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? "'" . $theValue . "'" : "NULL";
 break; 
 case "long":
 case "int":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? intval($theValue) : "NULL";
 break;
 case "double":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? doubleval($theValue) : "NULL";
 break;
 case "date":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? "'" . $theValue . "'" : "NULL";
 break;
 case "defined":
 $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? $theDefinedValue : $theNotDefinedValue;
 break;
 }
 return $theValue;
}
}

$rs1_Recordset1 = "-1";
if (isset($_GET['id'])) {
 $rs_Recordset1 = strtolower(str_replace ( '-', ' ',$_GET['id']));
}

mysql_select_db($database_localhost, $localhost);
$query_Recordset1 = sprintf("SELECT packbrand,packsuuid,packcollection,packsname,folder FROM packs where collectionid=%s and visible='1' order by serial asc",GetSQLValueString($rs_Recordset1, "text"));
$Recordset1 = mysql_query($query_Recordset1, $localhost) or die(mysql_error());
$row_Recordset1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($Recordset1);
$totalRows_Recordset1 = mysql_num_rows($Recordset1);
$xml=new SimpleXMLElement('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>'
 .'<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">'
 .'</urlset>'); 
do { 
 $brand=$row_Recordset1['packbrand'];
 $collection=$row_Recordset1['packcollection'];
 $url=$xml->addChild('url');
// $image="image:image";
 $website="http://www.tharsitis.gr/".strtolower(str_replace(' ','-',$brand."/".$collection."/".$row_Recordset1['packsuuid']));
 $img="http://www.tharsitis.gr/packagecache/".$row_Recordset1['folder']."/".$row_Recordset1['packsuuid'].".jpg";
 $url->addChild('loc',$website);
 $url->addChild('priority','0.7');
 $image = $url->addChild('image:image', null, 'http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1');
 $image->addChild('image:loc',$img, 'http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1');
 $image->addChild('image:caption',$row_Recordset1['packsname'], 'http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1');
 } while ($row_Recordset1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($Recordset1));
mysql_free_result($Recordset1);
print($xml->asXML());
?>

In both files you can skip the initial part where i build the recordset. This was all done automatically by Dreamweaver. Save the files as php files.
Finally, i needed to modify my .htaccess file so that it translated every php  request matching the above files to xml. This is a requirement to get Google validate the files correctly.

Rewriterule ^xmlindex.xml$ /xml/xmlindex.php [L]
Rewriterule ^p(.*).xml$ /xml/xmlpacks.php?id=$1 [L]

As you can see in the second line of the below htaccess code, I use url variables to generate dynamic xml sitemaps for different sets of urls.  Vuala!

MySQL Max grouping wrongly the data

mysql database
mysql database

I was trying to build a mysql image gallery, and for that reason i wanted to retrieve the largest value, according to a specific column, which would be smaller than a url variable i would retrieve from the user interface. This is the MySql command i used initially and which retrieved wrong results:

select max(idpacks), packuuid FROM table  where idpacks<"60" ;

which returned the following results:

# max(idpacks), packsuuid
'59', '0e1fdf98b90011e48438d067e54001ba'

The problem:

Even though the value 59 in the above result is the correct one, the packuuid does not correspond to the same row. Digging in a bit i found that it actually corresponds to the row which has the smallest idpacks value.  This took me all day to figure out 😀

The cause:

Quoting from web:

MySQL actually permits that an aggregate query returns columns not used in the aggregation (i.e. not listed in GROUP BY clause). It could be considered as flexibility, but in practice this can easily lead to mistakes if a person that designs queries does not understand how they will be executed

So I needed to modify the query.  My SQL query skills are not the best so bare with me. This is the solution I found to get the values i needed to the same row:

SELECT idpacks,packsuuid FROM packs  where idpacks=(select max(idpacks) from packs  where idpacks<"60" );

Which returned the correct values (correct packsuuid for idpacks 59):

# idpacks, packsuuid
'59', '0f6914f0b90011e48438d067e54001ba'

Worked for me!

PHP Image Resizing…

I have been searching for some time an easy way to change the size of jpg and png images on the fly – on the server. currently my preferred solution is the PHP Image resize script found here ..

The solution is extremely easy to implement. I use it to convert almost 1000 images whos filenames have stored in the database (on the fly).

Have found the following issues though:

  1. All of my images are google optimized (using jpegtran and optipng). After the conversion the new file is 10 times larger in size even though the  dimensions are similar (197×50 and 6kb to 200×50 and 30kb size). So there goes my optimization…
  2. I have manually converted most of my files to width 200 to match my web site layout. When an already 200pixels image passes from the script that sets it to comvert again to 100px,  it sometimes produces a blank png file with, and some times the quality of the image is very bad (even though you set it to convert with the highest quality). I will need to investigate this why the script behaves differently to different png  files if i wanna keep it.
$file="./brands/".$row_Recordset1['NAME']."/logo.png";
$resizedFile="./brands/".$row_Recordset1['NAME']."/".strtolower(str_replace ( ' ', '-', $row_Recordset1['NAME']))."_reslogo.png";

list($width, $height) =getimagesize($file);

echo $width;

//echo $height;

if (file_exists($file)){

 

if (file_exists($resizedFile)){

//to nothing

}else {

smart_resize_image($file , null, 201 , null , true , $resizedFile , false , false ,100 );
}
}else{
$resizedFile="./brands/no-logo-yet.png";
}

Update: Found that issue #2 was caused by the fact that i was scaling the image up, rather than down.  Issue #1 still persists though.

Here is a very informative post about the jpg image optimization and resizing using php native functions