Building PHP Applications With Macromedia Dreamweaver MX - In And Out (
Page 8 of 10 )
OK, so that took care of displaying the records - now how about
inserting and deleting records?
First, use the Dreamweaver editor to create an HTML form that maps to the columns
of the "user" table.
Once the form has been prepared, apply the "Insert Record" server behavior, and
you'll see a dialog box like this:
This dialog box makes it very easy to map form fields to the table in which data
is to be inserted. Once you select the appropriate database connection and table,
the fields of the table are displayed; these fields can be mapped to specific
fields in the form via the "Value" drop-down list. Dreamweaver takes care of writing
the SQL query needed to insert the data entered by the user in each field into
the appropriate column in the table.
After you've finished mapping form fields to table columns, remember to specify
the URL to which the browser should be redirected once the data has been successfully
inserted into the database.
Once you're done, save the PHP script and access it via your browser. You should
see the HTML form you created:
Enter some values and submit the form. The code generated by Dreamweaver MX will
insert the values into the "user" table and then redirect the browser to the URL
selected...all without the developer writing a single line of code!
It's just as simple to delete records - create a new PHP script and use the "Delete
Record" server behavior. You'll see the following dialog box, which asks you to
specify the variables that the script should use when identifying which record
to delete.
As you can see, in the example above, I've told Dreamweaver to look for the "id"
variable in the URL string, and to delete the record corresponding to that ID
in the "user" table. Save the script (I'll assume it's called "delete.php"), and
access it via your browser (remember to add the "id" variable-value pair to the
URL string, like thus: http://your.server/delete.php?id=15), and the record corresponding
to the ID provided should get deleted from the database.
Obviously, it's pretty easy to now link the three scripts above with each other,
so as to build a primitive, yet fully-functional, user administration module (in
case you're wondering, yes, Dreamweaver also comes with an "Update Record" behavior
- I'll leave that to you to experiment with.)
/ 32 
