RedCoupe

I was working on a couple of web pages this morning to allow completion of a course booking form, user then submits to a thankyou page, confirmation emails are sent etc.

The problem I faced was that only the course ID was being passed to the thankyou page so in the emails that are generated, it displays Course Details: 7 , instead of Course Details: 12/12/2011 PHP Basics.

So my initial thought was to create a hidden field just before the end form tag together with some javascript that gets the relevant label value:

document.getElementById('coursedetails').value = document.getElementById('training_id')[document.getElementById('training_id').selectedIndex].innerHTML;

Then in the thankyou page I just got Request.Form(“coursedetails”), this is in ASP VBScript just in case you were wondering. Works like a charm.

Since doing this is I should have done it a much easier way and not have to rely on JavaScript being enabled. I already had the value because I was already using it to display the dropdown list label. So the hidden field could have just contained the default value of the currently selected item.

Using MS SQL Server, I’ve been trying to get the second from last record that had been created because I want to do some comparison code to display what has been changed.

Anyway just form future reference here’s the SQL I used:

SELECT TOP 1 *
FROM dbo.tbl_MailList_Items
WHERE item_id < (SELECT MAX(item_id) FROM dbo.tbl_MailList_Items)
ORDER BY item_id DESC

This works perfectly for my situation and doesnt rely on just subtracting 1 from the id column because my id column is not fully incremental due to records being deleted etc.

From a standard Apache2 install I created a folder in /var/www/ called ‘testsite’ (without the quotes).

Go to the following folder:

/etc/apache2/sites-available

…and create a file called something suitable, for this purposes of this blog post I’ll just call my file testsite, It’s contents should be:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /var/www/testsite/
  ServerName testsite.localhost
  ServerAlias testsite.myubuntubox
  <Directory /var/www/testsite/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews +Includes
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Then run the following command:

sudo a2ensite testsite

Edit your /etc/hosts file and add the following lines:

127.0.0.1 testsite.localhost
127.0.0.1 testsite.myubuntubox
192.168.0.6 testsite.myubuntubox

Obviously the ip address 192.168.0.6 may be different depending on your network setup.

Restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

I also had to edit my c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file on my other PC to make sure that when I visit http://testsite.myubuntubox/ it resolves correctly, so I now have the following:

127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.0.6 myubuntubox
192.168.0.6 testsite.myubuntubox

That’s it, all working, now I can develop multiple websites locally using subdomains. Personally I would rather do it this way than putting websites into folders, seems to work better with Dreamweaver.

Format was: 2010-09-17 12:09:01

But wanted to display like: 17-09-2010 12:09:01

<?php echo date('d-m-Y H:m:s', strtotime($row_Recordset1['datetimeval'])); ?>

Related links:

• PHP: date – Manual
• PHP: strtotime – Manual

I had a textarea value which was obtained from a MySQL database and it contained many instances of crlf or \n. To display correctly on a web page I wanted to convert those to <br /> so I used the following code:

<?php echo nl2br($myrecorsetvalue); ?>

Obviously you would need to replace the $myrecorsetvalue with whatever recordset variable you are using.

A competition has been running on a website and all the entries were stored in a MySQL table.

Had to get a random record to pick a winner once the closing date had passed.

Here’s the SQL I used:

SELECT *
FROM t_tablename
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 1

If I had wanted to pick out 5 random winners, then change the LIMIT value to LIMIT 5.