Create Your Database
If you were able to see the phpMyAdmin window with your browser pointed at
http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/, you probably had little trouble creating a new database. Note that you may have to enter:
127.0.0.1 rather than
localhost depending on your browser's proxy settings.
After creating a database called
scores, it will show up in the list of databases on the drop down menu in the left column. Select the
scores database and a window will appear prompting you to create a new table. Enter
eng101 for the table name and
5 for the number of fields, then click
Go.
Enter the five field names: "Exercise," "realname," "Score,"
"Start_Time," and "End_Time." Be careful as the field names are
case-sensitive. To keep our first lesson simple, we will enter
everything into the database as text. Therefore, choose
VARCHAR for the type of data and
30 for the maximum length of your data. The
VARCHAR column can be any length from 0 to 255. Check
dev.mysql.com for more details on field types. Next, click
Save. Now that the database is complete, let's move on to making a quiz with
Hot Potatoes web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/.
Create Your Hot Potatoes Quiz
I am assuming that you have some experience creating quizzes using
Hot Potatoes. After you make a quiz, choose
Options and
Configure Output from the quiz menu.
Next, enter
results.php for the URL of the FormMail CGI script. We have not yet made the file
results.php, but you will later save
results.php
into the same directory as your .html quiz page. You do not need to
enter an email address. Save the settings and export your quiz as
quiz.html.
You may want to refer back to the March 2004 Wired column where we
walked through the steps of setting up Apache and MySQL on your
computer. For Windows users, save your .html quizzes to:
C:\AppServ\www\. Mac OS X users will save to:
/Library/WebServer/Documents/. Place any files that you want to make accessible via the Internet in these directories.
Write the PHP Script
Next, we need to create a simple text script that delivers the data
from the .html quiz to the scores database. Note that in the following
script, the comments after the double slashes are not necessary for the
script to run. Open your favorite text editor and enter the following
text:
<?php
// Connect to the local database using username root and no password.
mysql_connect ("localhost", "root", "");
// Select our database named scores.
mysql_select_db (scores);
// insert our 5 fields into the table eng101
mysql_query ("insert into eng101
(
realname,
Exercise,
Score,
Start_Time,
End_Time
)
VALUES
(
'$realname',
'$Exercise',
'$Score',
'$Start_Time'
, '$End_Time'
)
");
//Provide some feedback to the student.
echo ("Your answers have been saved!");
?>
Save this file as
results.php into the same folder as your
quiz.html file. Be sure you save it as unformatted text using
Notepad rather than
WordPad. Right click on the
results.php file and choose
properties (Windows users) or
Get Info (Mac users) to check that the file name appears as
results.php and not
results.php.txt.
Test Your Quiz
Open your web browser and type in the URL
http://localhost/quiz.html. You should get a prompt to enter your name. Take your quiz and submit the results. You should see a window saying: "
Your answers have been saved."
With the simple script we wrote above, there is no way to check that
the data was actually saved to the database unless we check it. Direct
your web browser back to:
http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/, choose the
scores database from the left menu and then click on the small icon that looks like a table to the left of the
eng101
table link. If all went well, your data should appear in the table. If
you don't see any data, don't give up. As I was going through these
steps on my own computer, I made several mistakes before I got it right.
Troubleshoot by backing up to the beginning and check each step
carefully. If you are still having problems, please feel free to send
the Wired column editors an email along with a detailed description of
your problem.
Important Note!
The setup of
MySQL and
phpMyAdmin are
NOT password protected with the default installation. If you are going to be using
MySQL and
phpMyAdmin on a web server that anyone has access to, you should set a root password for
MySQL dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql_intro.html and password protect the
phpMyAdmin folder using a .htaccess file
www.apacheweek.com/features/userauth.
