In late January, we had a wonderful birthday party for Kyle. It happened to be on the one day of snow we had all year, but the roads were decent enough to get around and no one was coming from very far. We had a science, mostly chemistry, themed party with a bunch of experiments making some kind of goo. Several people from my work loaned by stuff which was great. Suzanne did a wonderful job organizing it. I don’t have many photos as I was busy helping the entire time.

Kyle's birthday party

Kyle and Robby at Kyle's birthday party

Last weekend, Kyle had another party to go to at a bowling alley in Garwood. He had a great time. It worked out very well for us too as it was 4:30-6:00. Suzanne and I were able to leave a grab an early dinner at a nearby (excellent) Asian-fusion place by ourselves. Many kudos to Mikey’s parents. Sunday, we visited what will be Kyle’s day camp for most of the summer. It’s a really nice place (Oak Crest Day Camp), but not cheap. (At least his school year costs will drop a lot next year with full day school.)

 
Not too many plans for the near future. It looks like we’ll be heading our west to the Grand Canyon and southern Utah at the end of the summer. We’re still working on airline tickets, but we’re pretty excited. (Okay, maybe that wasn’t so brief.)

Extra: I had to toss in the one last photo of me at a recent metal (Megadeth & Motorhead) concert.

INSERT INTO tblMyTable (FirstName, LastName, Email, Phone)
     VALUES ('John', 'Doe', 'johndoe@gmail.com', '1234567890')

This is standard SQL. However, MySQL has an alternative syntax using SET which is similar to the UPDATE syntax:

INSERT INTO tblMyTable SET
       FirstName = 'John',
       LastName  = 'Doe',
       Email = 'johndoe@gmail.com',
       Phone = '1234567890'

I ended up using the alternative syntax throughout my project. Why? I felt it is much cleaner and easier to read than the standard syntax, especially when removing a column to insert. (When adding a column, it’s easy enough to add them to the end of the lists.) It should also greatly reduce errors from incorrect ordering between column names and values since they’re right next to each other. I realize that using MySQL specific syntax would break the site if it was moved to another database, but I don’t feel that was a concern for this project. In the real world, especially dealing with projects that are commercial and may/will grow larger, it might not be a good idea.

Here’s an example from my actual code:

$query = <<<EOT
    INSERT INTO tblReservations SET
        dtReservationDateTime = FROM_UNIXTIME($datetimeunix),
        intPartySize = {$_POST['numparty']},
        intCustomerID = "{$_POST['userid']}",
        vcReservationNameFirst = "{$_POST['firstname']}",
        vcReservationNameLast = "{$_POST['lastname']}",
        vcReservationEmail = "{$_POST['email']}",
        chReservationPhone = $phone,
        vcComments = "{$_POST['comment']}",
        dtReservationDateTimeMade = NOW()
EOT;

$('#datepicker').datepicker({
                inline: true,
                showOn: "both",
                buttonImage: "/cafemarburg/images/calendar.jpg",
                minDate: +1,
                maxDate: +180,
                beforeShowDay: checkClosedDates
        });

checkClosedDates is a function that returns an array of the form [true/false, a class to add, a tooltip message], the last two being optional. It takes the date (as a Javascript object) as a parameter.
Here is the function call:

var closedFullDates = new Array(); // Used for one-time closures or irregular scheduled holidays
var closedYearlyDates = new Array('12-25','7-4'); // Used to regular holidays (e.g., Christmas)
var closedDaysOfWeek = new Array('0')
function checkClosedDates(date) {
 var blocked = false;
 var ymd = date.getFullYear() + '-' + (date.getMonth()+1) + '-' + date.getDate();
 var md = (date.getMonth()+1) + '-' + date.getDate();
 if ($.inArray(ymd,closedFullDates) > -1) {
     blocked = true;
 } else if ($.inArray(md,closedYearlyDates) != -1) {
     blocked = true;
 } else if ($.inArray(String(date.getDay()),closedDaysOfWeek) != -1) {
     blocked = true;
 }
 if (blocked) {
    return [false,'dpClosedDate','Sorry, we are closed that day.'];
 } else {
     return [true];
 }
}

As can be seen, I use three separate arrays. One is for one-time events or events that change date year to year. Another is for dates that occur on the same date. The third is for days of the week.

$mystr = 'Here is a really long line of text that runs to '.
         'more than one line';

I found a very clean and convenient way is to use PHP’s heredoc syntax. Here’s an example:

$query = <<<EOT
        SELECT * FROM tblOrderItems
        INNER JOIN tblFoodItems
                ON tblFoodItems.intFoodItemID = tblOrderItems.intFoodItemID
        INNER JOIN tblFoodCategories
                ON tblFoodCategories.intFoodCategoryID = tblFoodItems.intFoodCategoryID
        INNER JOIN tblFoodCategoryOrder
                ON tblFoodCategoryOrder.intFoodCategoryID = tblFoodCategories.intFoodCategoryID
        WHERE intOrderID = {$order['intOrderID']}
        ORDER BY tblFoodCategoryOrder.intFoodCategoryOrder, tblFoodItems.vcFoodItemName
EOT;

There’s a few things to note:

• The EOT is arbitrary as long as both instances are the same. (I use EOT for “end of text”.)
• Variables can be included in the string. A simple variable is simply included as $myvar. Here, I use the {} to separate out a “complex” variable. (I didn’t realize this could be done until later on, so for some of my earlier instances, I set it to a simpler variable immediately before the heredoc declaration.)
• The terminator (here EOT;) MUST be on a line by itself with no leading or trailing whitespace. This cannot be emphasized enough. Leading whitespace is pretty easy to spot, but several times NetBeans added trailing whitespace which wasn’t obvious in and of itself. (NetBeans does color the heredoc string differently, so you will see the “carry over”.) I finally got in the habit of checking.

PHP ≥ 5.3.0 also has the nowdoc syntax. It’s very similar to heredoc except is uses $myvar = <<<’EOT’ (note the single quotes). The difference is that variables are not expanded akin to standard single quoted strings.