VinylFox » PHP http://www.vinylfox.com The Playground of VinylFox (Shea Frederick) Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:37:06 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Grid Filter Plugin – Backend Code (in PHP) http://www.vinylfox.com/grid-filter-php-backend-code/ http://www.vinylfox.com/grid-filter-php-backend-code/#comments Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:34 +0000 Shea Frederick http://ww2.vinylfox.com/?p=3 The code used for this example is available by itself, or as one of the examples in the ExtJS API download. This code is provided with the intent of showing how to build a filtered query from the Grid Filter Plugin in PHP, therefore it does NOT contain any security precautions. Please modify this script before use in a production environment.

The Plugin

If your not familiar with the Grid Filter plugin, I would suggest checking out the ExtJS User Extension and Plugins forum thread on this plugin. ExtJS has decided to include my PHP script in the example code released with their 2.1 API download, which I think is a great idea, since the question of how exactly to make this grid filtering work seems to come up very often.

The General Concept

There are five data types that can be filtered, and each of them has their own specific options.

  • string
  • list
  • boolean
  • numeric
  • date

All the info needed to filter a column is passed by the filter grid plugin as a single ‘filter’ post variable that essentially is a multi-dimentional array.

Each filtered column passes three values, and in some cases a fourth.

  • type
  • value
  • field
  • comparison (only for date or numeric – ne, eq, gt, lt)

This ends up making the post variable look something like this – with two filters.

	 filter[0][data][type] : list
	filter[0][data][value] : small,medium
	      filter[0][field] : size
	 filter[1][data][type] : boolean
	filter[1][data][value] : true
	      filter[1][field] : visible

The predictable format of post variables makes it easy to code the server side PHP for this.

The Code

This simple bit of code is all we need on the server side to have a fully filterable set of data.

See it in action here (switch ‘Local Filtering’ off)

UPDATE – 5/28 : Added support for ‘ne’ (not equals) on numeric and date fields.

]]> http://www.vinylfox.com/grid-filter-php-backend-code/feed/ 9 PHP/MySQL Efficient Paged Data http://www.vinylfox.com/phpmysql-efficient-paged-data/ http://www.vinylfox.com/phpmysql-efficient-paged-data/#comments Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:44:39 +0000 Shea Frederick http://ww2.vinylfox.com/?p=32 There was some talk recently about the inefficiency of running two queries verses a single query to retrieve paged data, so I decided to do some testing of my own, and here are my results.

The first way to retrieve paged data is to run two queries, the first query would be just like the second, just without the LIMIT statement. You would use mysql_num_rows to retreive the total count using the first query, and the second query would be your page of data.

Testing average for this configuration was 1.9 seconds for every 200 repetitions.

The second way is almost the same as the first, but instead of using mysql_num_rows to get a total count, we use SQL to provide the count.

Testing average for this configuration was 1.8 seconds for every 200 repetitions.

The third way is to use a single query, and utilize PHP to split the data into pages. It was suggested that this would be the fastest way because it only has a single call to the database, however testing showed that was not a correct assumption. The overhead for two calls to the database was not enough to out weigh the processing time needed for all the rows to be returned and PHP to process them.

Testing average for this configuration was 2.2 seconds for every 200 repetitions.

It would appear that the second method is the most efficient, followed closely by the first. This could change based on your dataset, for instance the third method might turn out to be the best in a situation where you dont have many rows in your table. There are also situations where the first method would run much slower than the second. My opinion would be to stick with the second method.

]]> http://www.vinylfox.com/phpmysql-efficient-paged-data/feed/ 4 The Grid – Basics of Paging http://www.vinylfox.com/grid-paging/ http://www.vinylfox.com/grid-paging/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2007 03:46:54 +0000 Shea Frederick http://ww2.vinylfox.com/?p=46 I would suggest downloading the code used for this example here so you have something to work with. A working example can be found here.

Grid Data

A paging grid must have a server side element to perform the breaking up of data into pages.

For this example we are using php as the server side language, and a MySQL database with some randomly generated data. The PHP script below is used to retrieve our data and break it up into pages using the limit and start variables that are passed from the paging toolbar.

Were not going to dig much into the server side code, since it can vary quite a bit for each developers needs and environment.

Whats Needed to Make a Paged Grid?

NOTE: The example uses ScriptTagProxy only because the data resides on a different server from the example code. In most cases you will be pulling data from the same server the code resides on and using HttpProxy.

The only difference in the data Store is the addition of a totalProperty declaration. In our example, we use ‘total’ which is coming from our server side script with the value for the total number of rows we had before breaking them up into pages.

The Paging Bar

Adding a paging toolbar to the bottom of the grid pane, and your almost done.

The last step is to pass the initial start and limit parameters to your data load.

A large portion of the time spent setting up paging is going to be your server side environment that handles passing data back and forth with the grid, once you have that in place the task of adding paging to a grid can be very simple.

The Final Product

grid-paging.js

grid-paging-working.php

]]> http://www.vinylfox.com/grid-paging/feed/ 2 Creating JSON Data in PHP http://www.vinylfox.com/creating-json-data-in-php/ http://www.vinylfox.com/creating-json-data-in-php/#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:00:38 +0000 Shea Frederick http://ww2.vinylfox.com/?p=48 So you need to encode JSON data for use with ExtJS or some other library? If you are lucky enough to be running PHP 5.2.0 or greater, then you have the optimal environment for encoding JSON data. But all is not lost if you dont have this setup, there are plenty of librarys you can use to take care of this task.

For our examples we are using a MySQL database as the data source.

PHP 5.2.0 or higher

As of PHP 5.2.0, the JSON extension is bundled and compiled into PHP by default, which makes life for you extremely easy. This is also a highly optimized implementation of JSON for PHP, so if you have this available to you, then use it.

Eleven lines of code and you have data ready to be used by many of the Ext objects.

Less than PHP 5.2.0 and no root access

The PEAR JSON package will be the way to go if you cant use PHP 5.2.0 or greater and you do not have root access to install php extensions. There are other libraries available, but this librarys inclusion in PEAR makes it the clear choice for reliability.

http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-proposal-show.php?id=198

Just two more lines of code to include the library, create an instance of the JSON service, and change the call to encode (line 14).

Less than PHP 5.2.0 with root access

For those of you that need to keep your current version of PHP but want the speed gained by using the PHP JSON extension can download and install it yourself, granted you have root access to the box your on.

http://www.aurore.net/projects/php-json/

This way you can use the native PHP JSON functions, so the example code for PHP 5.2.0 or higher will work.

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