This is likely the most ridiculous question I've ever had to ask but it's been a LONG time since I've ever worked with a static HTML site and I might not have had enough coffee this morning.
Can you have a search function on a static HTML site that does NOT have a database?
My client is migrating a site from ASP to HTML and they want to keep the search function on there but it literally is just a collection of static files. Nothing else. No Database, nothing.
Is this possible?
Do I need more coffee?
Well it's not possible using only HTML. However it's possible to create a search function without a traditional database. But still - the data needs to come from somewhere, if not a database then perhaps a txt or xml file. That said, it can be achieved using HTML+JavaScript if you don't want to involve a server-side language.
There are many tutorials on how to create these types of search functions using for example XML as a data source. Just google something like "XML HTML Search" and you'll probably find what you're looking for :)
Related
I have been writing SQL queries for a while now, but brand new to HTML.
I have been using Sublime text to code HTML and using Mysql - Workbench to code databases etc on local server.
I'm wondering..
How do I code HTML to return SQL queries onto a console (Google Chrome)? and connect the two together
I have searched all over google and You Tube, only thing I can find is something to do with PHP.. not sure what how it works, but don't think that is something I need.
All I want to do is create a text box inside HTML and input id value as an example 10 and return the id number along with the whole row from the database.
Using this query: select * from tableName where id = 10;
HTML is a document formatting language. While it supports JavaScript, said JavaScript is sandboxed in the browser: It cannot easily access files and the like even when that other stuff is running on the same computer as the browser. The main reason here is security. Imagine every web page on the Internet could look at every file on your disk, copy them or save new files on your disk or modify them.
So what you need is a "server software" of some kind. This software talks to the browser. It sends it all the HTML that the browser requests. The HTML can then ask for more (for example using JavaScript and AJAX). These requests go to the server which parses the parameters, collects the data (only the server talks to the database) and sends results back.
This is a pretty complicated and involved process. For this reason, everyone uses a framework to do it. The framework handles all the ugly stuff like converting query results from the database into the types and objects of the programming language and then again to HTML code which looks good.
Since you don't know any programming languages, yet, I suggest you start with Python. A good web framework for Python is called "Django". Django also contains modules to talk to databases. It also has many "widgets" like tables that display query results.
Google for "python django mysql" which should give you plenty of examples.
I am interested in allowing users to "share" information on my website, say something similar to a bulletin board concept. This is something I've never done before because I know that it could introduce security issues.
I'll likely be using ColdFusion as my scripting language. I'm also familiar with PHP, but am leaning towards CF because of its built-in RichText control. The database back-end will either be MySql or SQLServer.
And so, my question boils down to this: What are the specific security issues and how do I screen user input for them? Does the method of SQL storage have any barring (say VARCHAR vs BLOB)?
We actually use a CMS for the primary pages of our site, and the heart of it uses a database vs actual files on the system. So for most of the content on our site, we actually have HTML which is being retrieved from a database.
For example
blurb.body will equal something like '<p>This is a body paragraph</p>'
Then one thing we seem to run into sometimes is a character encoding error. It seems like if someone copies some text into the CMS with a " ' " or something, there isn't anything that will convert it automatically to a '.
But yes, you should be able to do it. Just make sure whatever filtering you do going into the database is reversed correctly on its way out.
I've got a lack of understanding at the moment. I'm developing a website with many articles and instead of creating a .html page for every article, I thought about storing the text into a database and get it from there (somehow) again.
I'm totally unsure if it is the common way to store text in a database. How do all of the "big" websites handle the mass of articles they publish? They won't create single pages neither but instead using a database, I guess.
But how can I achieve this? How can I store whole html files with divs and jquery and stuff into a database and get them when clicking on a link? Might XML be a keyword?
First of all, you need to clearly understand how things should work.
Clearly the approach of creating a page per article cannot work for multiple reasons:
if you have a huge number of articles you'll need to have a huge number of pages
if you need to change something small in design, you'll need to make that change for every single stored article
What you need to do is to create a more generic page, which has all the common stuff for all articles in it (a place for title, a place for content). The articles themselves can be stored in a database. When opening a page for a specific article, your application should place the title and content in the right place in that page.
This approach is universal _ it will work for any number of articles.
The keywords you are looking for are : Dynamic, Content Management.
In order to achieve this, you should learn a scripting language, PHP for example.
You will find a lot of tutorials to get started and how to make your website a bit more dynamic.
But you were right about the database part, most blogging systems and other content providers use databases to store all of this in data tables. PHP (and some other languages) would allow you to interface the database and the content you provide to your users.
You should look into using a web development framework like ruby on rails. Rails has templating that essentially let's you define variables inside of your html (e.g. "text of article").
As for storing the text of the article, the way I do things like that is to store them in a file on my server and then fetch that file using AJAX and then insert into an html file.
Most sites accomplish this by having templates, in which the common-to-every-page html is stored in a file. Page-specific data (article text, etc.) is stored in the database and "inserted" into the relevant parts of the template before returning to the client.
download word press and check how it work! it will help you
http://wordpress.org/download/
I'm trying to write a Macro that retrieves data on all HTTP Post forms from a webpage, and then displays the possible inputs as column headings in a worksheet. (Later I'll write another macro that constructs the appropriate requests based on input from the rows below.)
I've spent a day trying to parse the HTML with regex, (classic rookie mistake, right?), and it's a disaster. Nothing seems to work for more than a couple of webpages.
My question is sort of a big picture one. Should it be able to work with REGEX? Should I be taking an entirely different approach? Is this too big a task for someone who doesn't know a whole lot about html, and web development more broadly? I thought it would be a simple project, but it just doesn't seem to be.
don't use regex. use an html parser. Since you said you're using vba, I'll make a guess that you have excel installed. excel has a "import data from web" function that works on any well formed html table.
and if that doesn't work, most platforms that have vba also have a web browser control of some kind. load your target web page in an instance of said control, and access the table you want with the DOM's methods.
I'd love to do this:
UPDATE table SET blobCol = HTTPGET(urlCol) WHERE whatever LIMIT n;
Is there code available to do this? I known this should be possible as the MySQL Docs include an example of adding a function that does a DNS lookup.
MySQL / windows / Preferably without having to compile stuff, but I can.
(If you haven't heard of anything like this but you would expect that you would have if it did exist, A "proly not" would be nice.)
EDIT: I known this would open a whole can-o-worms re security, however in my cases, the only access to the DB is via the mysql console app. Its is not a world accessible system. It is not a web back end. It is only a local data logging system
No, thank goodness — it would be a security horror. Every SQL injection hole in an application could be leveraged to start spamming connections to attack other sites.
You could, I suppose, write it in C and compile it as a UDF. But I don't think it really gets you anything in comparison to just SELECTing in your application layer and looping over the results doing HTTP GETs and UPDATEing. If we're talking about making HTTP connections, the extra efficiency of doing it in the database layer will be completely dwarfed by the network delays anyway.
I don't know of any function like that as part of MySQL.
Are you just trying to retreive HTML data from many URLs?
An alternative solution might be to use Google spreadsheet's importHtml function.
Google Spreadsheets Lets You Import Online Data
Proly not. Best practises in a web-enviroment is to have database-servers isolated from the outside, both ways, meaning that the db-server wouldn't be allowed to fetch stuff from the internet.
Proly not.
If you're absolutely determined to get web content from within an SQL environ, there are as far as I know two possibilities:
Write a custom MySQL UDF in C (as bobince mentioned). The could potentially be a huge job, depending on your experience of C, how much security you want, how complete you want the UDF to be: eg. Just GET requests? How about POST? HEAD? etc.
Use a different database which can do this. If you're happy with SQL you could probably do this with PostgreSQL and one of the snap-in languages such as Python or PHP.
If you're not too fussed about sticking with SQL you could use something like eXist. You can do this type of thing relatively easily with XQuery, and would benefit from being able to easily modify the results to fit your schema (rather than just lumping it into a blob field) or store the page "as is" as an xhtml doc in the DB.
Then you can run queries very quickly across all documents to, for instance, get all the links or quotes or whatever. You could even apply XSL to such a result with very little extra work. Great if you're storing the pages for reference and want to adapt the results into a personal "intranet"-style app.
Also since eXist is document-centric it has lots of great methods for fuzzy-text searching, near-word searching, and has a great full-text index (much better than MySQL's). Perfect if you're after doing some data-mining on the content, eg: find me all documents where a word like "burger" within 50 words of "hotdog" where the word isn't in a UL list. Try doing that native in MySQL!
As an aside, and with no malice intended; I often wonder why eXist is over-looked when people build CMSs. Its a database that can store content in its native format (XML, or its subset (x)HTML), query it with ease in its native format, and can translate it from its native format with a powerful templating language which looks and acts like its native format. Sometimes SQL is just plain wrong for the job!
Sorry. Didn't mean to waffle! :-$