Lights! Camera! Action! - PHP

PHP4 comes with a bunch of new functions designed to allow FTPconnections over the Web. This article explores the new FTP functions,together with an example of how they can be used to build a browser-basedFTP client.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

By: Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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November 07, 2000

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The primary workhorse of the application is the file "actions.php4", which is reproduced below:


<html>
<head>
<basefont face=Arial>
</head>
<body>
<!-- the include.php4 interface will be inserted into this page -->
<?
// check for valid form entries else print error
if (!$server || !$username || !$password)
{
echo "Form data incomplete!";
}
else
{
// keep reading
}
?>
</body>
</html>

Right up front, "actions.php4" checks if the various form variables exist - if not, it simply prints an error message. If the variables exist, the script will proceed to the "else" clause of the conditional statement.

Next come the various "actions". This script has been built to allow the following types of actions:

"action=CWD"

change working directory

"action=Delete"

delete selected file(s)

"action=Download"

download selected file(s)

"action=Upload"

upload selected file

If you take a look at the file "include.php4", which contains the HTML interface, you'll see that it consists of a number of forms, each one linked to a specific function. Each of these forms contains a field (usually hidden) which specifies the action to be taken when that specific form is submitted.

For example, the button marked "Delete", when clicked, sends the directive "action=Delete" to the PHP script "actions.php4", while the button "Go" sends the directive "action=CWD" to the script.

In order to handle these four actions, the meat of "actions.php4" is a set of branching conditional statements, like this:


<?
// action: change directory
if ($action == "CWD")
{
// script code
}
// action: delete file(s)
else if ($action == "Delete")
{
// script code
}
// action: download files
else if ($action == "Download")
{
// script code
}
// action: upload file
else if ($action == "Upload")
{
// script code
}
?>

Each of these branches includes code to connect to the FTP server, perform the selected action and exit.

Typically, this code follows a simple progression:



connect to the FTP server and log in through the user-defined function
connect();
change to the appropriate directory;
perform the selected action;
refresh the list of available files to reflect changes;
display the file list and control buttons through the include()d file
"include.php4";
close the FTP connection.

These sections are commented liberally in the code listing which follows.

Some points to be noted here:

The actions that deal with multiple files - namely, "action=Delete" and "action=Download" - use "for" loops to iterate through the array of selected files and delete or download each of them.

The variables $cdir and $here are refreshed at each stage to indicate the current directory.

This article copyright Melonfire 2000. All rights reserved.

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