Question

I am having some trouble with getting my custom dashboard single_page to interact with the database correctly.

Screenshot: http://i54.tinypic.com/2lvh45d.jpg

Testimonial Code (single_pages/dashboard/testimonials.php): http://pastebin.com/PK4ziRih

newTestimonials.php Code:

<?php
defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die("Access Denied.");
$testimonial_name = $_POST['testimonial_name'];
$testimonial_content = $_POST['testimonial_content'];
$url = "http://www.eurofloors.co.nz/dashboard/testimonials/";

$con = mysql_connect('localhost', 'username', 'password');
if (!$con)
  {
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
  }

mysql_select_db("eurofloo_website", $con);

$sql = "INSERT INTO testimonials (id, name, content) VALUES " . $testimonial_name . $testimonial_content;

mysql_query($sql);

/* Redirect browser */
header("Location:" .$url);
/* Make sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */
exit;
?>

save_testimonials.php Code:

<?php
defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die("Access Denied.");

$existing_testimonials_update = $_POST['data'];

$con = mysql_connect('localhost', 'username', 'password');
if (!$con)
  {
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
  }

mysql_select_db("eurofloo_website", $con);

$sql = "INSERT INTO testimonials VALUES " . $existing_testimonials_update;

$result = mysql_query($sql);


mysql_close($con);

?>

My problem with this page is, when I submit the new testimonial form or click save on the data grid at the bottom. I get the Page Not Found error, because concrete5 can’t seem to see the php files set in the action attribute of the forms.
Is there an obvious reason why this would be happening or is it because I havn’t used the MVC approach?

Can you please point me the right direction?
The main thing I am looking for, is some sort of documentation of examples for controller & model syntax for db interaction and form data processing.

Any advice or resources given are very much appreciated.

ps: I am still quite new to PHP so I may be approaching the code for this in the wrong way.

Answer 1

Ahh… yeah, you’re going to experience nothing but pain if you try to work around the routing system Concrete5 already has in place (as opposed to a little bit of pain working within it, unfortunately).
I highly recommend reading this “how-to” in their documentation:

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/build-a-single-page-powered-editing-interface-for-concrete5/

When you say you’re new to PHP, are you new to web programming in general, or are you already familiar with other languages and MVC frameworks? If the latter, then I will caution that there’s a really ugly thing going on in the above article, where different views for controller actions are all in one view file separated with a big “if” statement. If this offends your sensibilities like it does mine, I have figured out a way to make this work better, let me know if you want to see that. [EDIT: See https://github.com/jordanlev/c5_boilerplate_crud for a better technique. It works out-of-the-box on Concrete5.5.0 and higher. If you’re stuck on 5.4.x, you can apply this patch to your system to make that work properly: https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/pull/147/files ]. If you’re new to programming in general, you can completely ignore this paragraph as it won’t make much sense 🙂

As for the database code you’re using, if you are interacting with the Concrete5 database, don’t use all that mysql_connect stuff — C5 already establishes a database connection and it uses the ADODB library to interface with it, like so:

$db = Loader::db();
$sql = "INSERT INTO testimonials (name, content) VALUES ?, ?";
$vars = array($testimonial_name, $testimonial_content);
$db->query($sql, $vars);

Note that I’ve left out the “id” from the list of fields of your insert statement — I’m guessing the id is an auto-increment primary key field in the MySQL table, which means you don’t insert anything for it (the database will just magically create its own number). This is a general MySQL thing, btw — doesn’t have anything to do with C5 specifically.

If you wanted to connect to a different database, then the “Loader” code would be slightly different — see the “Connecting to Other Databases” section on this page: http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/developers/system/database-connectivity (and especially note the last line in the sample code there that resets the connection when done — you must do this otherwise Concrete5 will fail miserably after your custom code runs).

Good luck!