Because it makes business sense!  If you could cut your business data application development cycle down by as much as 90%, and enable one full-stack developer to do the work that typically would need 3 or more specialists (database developer + back-end web services developer + front end web developer + QA for each).  That’s what I call a good set of reasons.  And … with very little downside.

Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools have been around for many years and in all different computing eras, from mainframe to minicomputer, and client server to web.  Powerbuilder was one of my favorites from the early days of client/server because it was so amazingly fast to build bug free Windows applications talking to complex enterprise grade SQL databases.  On the mini platform, I had many great times working with PACE on the Wang VS. They both did a full round trip soup to nuts rapid application build, taking care of all the plumbing in a tight yet flexible and extensible way that hasn’t really been equalled since.   And that meant that our QA was focused on did the application meet the business requirements?  Not on did a page or window render correctly!  Not only was our development cycle faster, cheaper, better, but we had a fraction of the QA people needed too.  Usually the business analyst/requirements team could do the needed QA.

But aren’t RAD tools just CRUD assemblers?  No. absolutely not.  Simple CRUD tools like Rails, or PHP Cake are better described as skeletons that you can edit with any text editor, and they save you some effort.  But you are still writing a lot of code by hand.  Code libraries are simply that too… libraries you incorporate in your code.

PHPRunner, and its sibling product ASPRunner, from XLineSoft, essentially inspect your database tables and relations and can generate a fully functional “80%” application in minutes.  The editing tool makes it full round trip, as you simply edit the fields using simple editors to choose fields on pages, set security options, change field labels in multiple languages, and so on.  then hit “build”, and you are done again.

And fully customizable too.  You have a full set of events that you can place your code in, and in several years working with PHPRunner, i have yet to find it lacking in appropriate events to put code, whether javascript or PHP.

It comes with jQuery embedded, so that’s easy to tap into for any custom DOM tweaking, or Ajax manipulations.  Although those are rarely needed.

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There are lots of ways you could approach this, if your needs are very specific. But I wanted a generic way of displaying some context sensitive user help in my PHPRunner applications. I have several PHPRunner projects that are using the same database, and the same help information.

Here were my requirements:-

• accessible from a simple “Help” top level menu item at all times so I dont have to edit every single page that needs help
• No matter which screen’set’ was active, the help menu item should open a new tab/window with the help content relevant to that screen set
• I wanted to add the very bare minimum of application or PHP code to each app/project that was to use the help feature. Ideally, each screen set would set a help page ‘name’ as a session variable and that would be it
• All code related to the help activity would be limited to the menu item, and then by the target help application. I did not want to have to write custom help code in every application
• Ideally the target help ‘application’ would be a PHPRunner project because it would be easy to create and be pretty much ‘bug free’ taking care of all the normal rendering / html housekeeping. i.e., I could have written a custom PHP external page, but I wanted to try a couple of other techniques too
• I wanted the help page content to be in a database table so that my subject matter experts could edit the page content, and do some basic formatting.  Essentially, enable it so that you didnt have to have PHPRunner editor to change static pages inside an application! Okay… busted… make it so that I didn’t have to edit help pages…

Challenges! And therefore what this tutorial will demonstrate!!

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This is one of those tiny little tips for “how to… ?” that I run into occasionally.
In PHPRunner (or ASPRunner!) events, like CustomAdd, where you are often doing more complex SQL processing, like inserting records into the current or related tables, you often need to know the ID of the record you just manually inserted in a CustomQuery(). I’m assuming that you are using AutoIncrement ID primary keys in this case.
For example, in an Employee Add process, in the customAdd event, I may have an additional step that inserts a row into a “user” table which is associated to the employee row.

$sql = "insert into user (field1, field2) values (somevalue, somevalue)";
 CustomQuery($sql);

Now perhaps you need to set the userID column in the Employee record to the ID of the User record just inserted. How do you get that value?

Recall that all your database work is happening on a global object in PHPRunner called $conn.
If you declare that as global in your script (first line!) then you get access to $conn in your script.

global $conn;

// rest of your script.

Now you can use regular MySQL functions to get the insert id out of $conn. Its a similar process for other supported databases.

all you need to code in your script is:-

$last_inserted_id = mysqli_insert_id($conn);

That’s it! Now you know the value of the autoincremented ID for the last inserted record that was done using $conn.

enjoy!

Okay, this is one of the most difficult things to do in any event driven, web development environment. And it’s no different in PHPRunner. Most of the event code we’re playing with is PHP code. The snag is, you can’t just stick an “alert” in any old event line and have it appear on the screen! javascript is interfering with things… PHP code is on the server not the browser, flow of control has to happen before that alert gets back to the browser, lots of things basically get in the way of tracing what’s really happening in your front end and back end code. Continue Reading