Today I want to speak about populating datagrid techniques with PHP. At least in my daily work datagrids and tabular data are very common, because of that I want to show two different techniques when populating datagrids with data from our database. Maybe it's obvious, but I want to show the differences.

He uses "old school spaghetti code" rather than a framework to keep things simple and pulls the data from the database with a PDO connection. This information is then manually pushed into an HTML table and the data grid functionality is applied to it. The other method involves a little bit of JSON magic that the data grid library pulls in and populates for you, still appending rows to a table.

He notes that the second method seems faster to the user since the page and table are rendered first, but it also comes at the cost of more than one HTTP request.

In this article, I'll be introducing you to the Structures_DataGrid package, showing you how it can be used to display structured data in tabular form. I'll be showing you how to hook it up to various data sources (including a CSV file, an RSS feed and an Excel spreadsheet), and how to format the resulting output so it's as pretty (or as ugly) as you want it to be.

They talk about what you'll need to get started (the different packages for different kinds of data) and some sample code to help you down the path to more attractive tables. There's even a bit touching on some of the more advanced features like exporting to Excel, pagination and data sorting.

Welcome to the final part of the series "Iterators in the Simplest Sense." In this set of articles, you'll learn the basic concepts of iterators in PHP 4 and PHP 5. The overall learning experience is strongly focused on the practical sense of the topic, so you can start quickly using iterators within your own PHP applications.

In this last article I'll explore the implementation of PHP 5 iterators, by utilizing some of the embedded classes that integrate the powerful SPL package. Thus you can learn quickly how to include these programming structures inside your PHP applications.

They jump right in and start working with the SPL functions to create a simple, readable iterator class ("FileIterator"). They follow this with two examples building on the class - one that works with data from a text file, and the other from a MySQL database.]]> Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:26:35 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4996 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4996 second part in their "Iterators in the Simplest Sense" series - this time focusing on traversing different data structures.

Welcome to the second tutorial of the series "Iterators in the simplest sense." Just in case you didn't know, this series introduces Iterators in PHP 4 - PHP 5, explaining their basic concepts, and teaches you how to use them in practical projects, which can be utilized as part of larger PHP applications.

By the end of this tutorial, I hope you'll have an accurate idea of how to use a generic Iterator structure. I will show how it is useful for traversing different data structures by providing specific implementations for each of the abstract methods defined within the base Iterator class.

They look first at extending the code that they had before by making an interator to work with a MySQL connection. They discuss how it will all work prior to coding (plan first, code later) before moving into the actual coding process and creating the class. The iterator, once extended, provides an interface between you and the normal MySQL functions, making it easier to handle the results from your queries (with things like "countAffectedRows" and "seekRow").]]> Wed, 15 Mar 2006 12:50:40 -0600