Question

I built a document upload admin screen, where my client can browse and upload pdf documents to a mysql dbase.

I have two separate tables for the Agendas, and one for Minutes. both have separate table names “upload” and “upload_mins”.

on the index.php page, I have the page fetch each row of the database, and display all of the valid documents on a “download” page.

I have come a across a problem.

Each dbase is set to increment ID. now that there is two databases, they are coming to utilize the same ID.

so I am pulling from the Agenda table:

http://www.example.com/clerk.php?ID=77

and I am pulling from the Minutes table also:

http://www.example.com/clerk.php?ID=77

and they happen to have the same increment ID.

Is there some way to avoid this? Can I add a field parameter to the minutes to make sure that they don’t have the same URL when pulling documents?

Create a integer field, or txt field?

i.e. http://www.example.com/clerk.php?ID=77&min=yes

Answer 1

If these are just documents, you could store them in a single table but have a column called type that differentiates between minutes and agendas. That way, IDs will be unique.

You could also extend the types column be a foreign key to a types table, so you can extend it to include additional document types such as spreadsheets in the future easily.

This would also aid the front-end display, as you would only need one query to fetch the documents within a batch or timeframe, but add them to differing arrays. For example:

// get the last 20 uploaded documents
$sql = "SELECT * FROM documents ORDER BY created DESC LIMIT 0,20";
$res = mysql_query($sql);
while ($doc = mysql_fetch_object($res)) {
    $type = $doc->type;
    if (!isset($docs[$type]) || !is_array($docs[$type])) {
        $docs[$type] = array();
    }
    $docs[$type][] = $doc;
}

// loop over agendas
foreach ($docs['agendas'] as $agenda) {
    echo '<a href="download.php?id=' . $agenda->id . '">' . $agenda->title . '</a>';
}

// loop over minutes
foreach ($docs['minutes'] as $minutes) {
    echo '<a href="download.php?id=' . $minutes->id . '">' . $minutes->title . '</a>';
}

...