Oh yea, I used to be a php programmer...

I used to do a lot of php programming.  When I first entered into moodle, it was in the development capacity. My collegues supported the server and the service that our department offered, I developed custom reports, DBs, utilities in support of my customers.  Over the course of 5 years, staff left and my role became more system analysis, DB analyst, "the fix it guy" and occasionally, a little php programming.

Today, I got a request from my customer to remove some teachers from a list on our website and to add another.  I thought it was a hardcoded list where I simply added the names to an html document.  Thankfully, I was wrong. 

 In the *space where the page lives, I had build a nice simplish php application.  The url looks like this , http://studentmoodle.accelerateu.org/student/portal/studentindex.php?action=staff

Note the ?action=staff at the end of the URL.  That is a trademark of the old MVC design pattern, where you send the requests through a common page or event (studentindex.php) with an action that tells the page which event to load, ?action=staff.

In studentindex.php, there are *events that looks like this.

       include_once('../config.php');
       include_once('appWideVars.php');
       include_once('DAO.php');

        echo "div class='container'>";
            echo "div id='wrapper'>";
               
                switch ($action) {

                 case 'contactus':
                        require_once('header.php');
                        require_once('menu.php');
                        echo "div class='movetoleft'>";
                            require_once('contactus.php');                       
                        echo "/div>";

                        require_once('footer.php');
                       
                  break;

                case 'staff':
                        require_once('header.php');
                        require_once('menu.php');
                       
                        echo "div class='movetoleft'>";
                            require_once('teachers.php');                   
                        echo "/div>";

                        require_once('footer.php');
                       
                  break;

Sorry, I had to break the html a little in the post - so it would not try to actually implement it. You can see the intelligent design where I have set a page variable and am using a case statement to evaluate its result.  This makes me happy, remembering how to build an application the intelligent way.  The page actions is stored in the $action variable.  This is set in the included appWideVars.php file.

The code in appWideVars.php that looks for and sets the page action in the $action variable

    if(isset($_REQUEST['action'] )){
        $action = $_REQUEST['action'];
    }else{//initial state
        $action = "home";
    }

The case I was looking for, 'staff' includes a page called teachers.php.  When I opened that page, I see that in fact I have not hardcoded the teacher names into the page but rather had persisted them in a DB somewhere.  I knew this based on the include of a file called DAO.php.  This is clear evidence of data coming from a DB and not living in the page.  DAO.php is a acronym called (data access object).  Its job is to handle communication with data persisting in a DB somewhere. 

Here is the teachers.php content.

    include_once('DAO.php');
   
    echo 'h3>AccelerateU Teachers h3>';
   
    $result = getTeachers();
   
    //var_dump($result);
   
    echo "table>
            tr>
                th>Subject/td>
                th>Teacher - Email/td>
                th>Bio/td>
            tr>
    ";
       
    foreach($result as $i){
        echo "tr>";
            echo "td>".$i->subjects."

";
            echo "td>a href='mailto:".$i->email."' title='teacher email'>".$i->fname." ".$i->lname."/a>/td>";
            echo "td>".$i->bio."/td>";
        echo "tr>";
   
    }
   
    echo "table>";

Sorry - I had to break the html in the page.  I am calling the getTeachers() method and looping over the result set and using html to show the output.

Notice the include DAO.php statement in the top of the page.  When I open the DAO.php file, I can find the getTeachers method.

    function getTeachers(){
        global $DB;
        //echo "test";
       
        return
       
        $DB->get_records_sql('
            SELECT idteachers, fname, lname, subjects, email, pic, bio
            FROM geniusintegration.teachers
           
            ORDER BY subjects, lname
           
        ');
    }

This method gets all the records from the geniusintegration.teachers table and returns them to the DAO.php file, which returns them to the teachers.php file

In a nutshell the MVC design pattern in action

model = the DAO.php file
view = teachers.php
controller = studentindex.php

The end.