1. A VFP programmer’s experience learning php

2.  Php stands for php hypertext preprocessor. Enjoy the recursive acronym? Originally, it was personal home page, but it has grown to much more than that.  It is a language used for developing web pages

3.  Interviewing Wounded Warriors over six years to discover Quality of Life.  Participants log on to web site and answer questions every six months.  Data are collected and transferred to SQL Server back end.  My mission is to learn the existing application, take over maintenance, and eventually start enhancing system.

4.  NetBeans – an IDE that gives hints and intellisense while developing  PostgreSQL and mySQL (web side Databases)  Javascript  JQuery  Virtualbox  WampServer (Windows Apache MySQL Php)  Ipswitch WS_FTP

5.  You eat an elephant one bite at a time.  I’ll choose a piece which coincides best with my experience.  Designed and built a SQL Server database to store relevant data.  Began to modify the process that exports data from PostgreSQL to SQL Server.

6.  Five separate buttons to generate text files ◦ First button exports answers and takes 25 minutes ◦ Buttons must be done in order for parameters to be kept from previous button. ◦ Requires entering dates and users each time  Open text files in Excel to review  Run SSIS to import into SQL Server

7.  One button  No parameter entry required  Puts all data directly into Excel spreadsheet  Run SSIS to import into SQL Server_

8.  Can you get there from here?  Show the current code in NetBeans ◦ Building a where clause ◦ Row processing ◦ Filtering by evaluating each row  Show the revised code in NetBeans ◦ Build a view which implements the where clause ◦ Set processing ◦ Filtering prior to evaluating

9.  Not as daunting as I thought it would be  VFP skills that are applicable to php ◦ Database design (first and foremost) ◦ Test-driven programming technique ◦ Optimizing queries  Not null vs (‘yes’ or ‘no’  Length($studyno) = 5  Order of tables (most limited % result sets first) ◦ Looping  Case  While  Foreach

10.  Syntactical differences ◦ Brackets ◦ Semi-colons ◦ incrementing  Debugging is more difficult (but may improve with acquiring knowledge) ◦ Xdebug ◦ Xxdebug ◦ Var_dump ◦ echo

11.  Create tables to mimic SQL database in PostgreSQL  Revise code to populate SQL tables ◦ In parallel ? ◦ Using triggers in PostgreSQL?  Acquire knowledge of debugging tools