Question

I’m trying to export my database tables to LaTeX in PHPMyAdmin. It does generate a “comments” column, but nothing is put in there eventhough I do have comments for several fields of the table I’m trying to export. (and of course I do have the “comments”-checkbox checked). Does anybody know a solution to this, or is this simply a bug in (this version of) PHPMyAdmin?

I’m using MySQL 5.5.9 with PHPMyAdmin version 3.3.9.2.

Answer 1

I decided to solve the problem by myself by writing the following PHP-script. It makes LaTeX-tables from all MySQL tables in the database, with a Field column for the row name, and a Description column for the comments. The code does not contain the MySQL connection logic. It can be a nice addition in your documentation to the graphical schemes that can be made with MySQLWorkbench. For good displaying in a web browser, use nl2br().

function showDescriptions(){
    $result = "";
    $tables = mysql_query("SHOW TABLES");
    while($table = mysql_fetch_row($tables)){
        $columns = mysql_query("SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM `".$table[0]."`");
        $result .= "\begin{table}[h!] %b!p!\n";
        $result .= '\begin{tabular}{|p{0.3\textwidth}|p{0.63\textwidth}|}'."\n";
        $result .= "\hline\n";
        $result .= "Field & Description\\\\\n";
        $result .= "\hline \hline\n";
        while($column = mysql_fetch_array($columns)){
            $result .= LaTeXSafe($column['Field']);
            $result .= " & ";
            $result .= LaTeXSafe($column['Comment']);
            $result .= "\\\\\n";
            $result .= "\hline\n";
        }
        $result .= '\end{tabular}'."\n";
        $result .= '\vspace{-7pt}'."\n";
        $result .= '\caption{\textit{Field descriptions of table '.$table[0].'}}'."\n";
        $result .= '\vspace{-7pt}'."\n";
        $result .= '\label{table-'.$table[0].'}'."\n";
        $result .= '\end{table}'."\n\n\n";
    }
    return $result;
}

function LaTeXSafe($text){
    return str_replace("_", "\_", $text);
}

I hope it’s useful to someone.