Auto updating content in an App from a PHP web service - php

I am making an App using PhoneGap where there is a catalogue of products in a database. This content (image URL's, descriptions, prices etc) is likely to be updated weekly, so I want a way for the app to check the database and see which products are up to date. The idea is that the app should update its self when the phone has a network connection, so the catalogue is up to date.
I was thinking of having a timestamp field for each product which is updated whenever that product is changed, and when the user logs into the app it checks the stored timestamp for that product and checks it against the database. If the server DB is newer than the one on the app it would download info for that product.
Is this an efficient way to keep info up to date, or is there a more effective way?

What about grab the products with jquery from an API-rest (In the server) and put in a local database like localStorage, indexedDB or SQL-HTML5?
And then use the items from the database.

Related

Storing information in xml. Is this the right idea?

I am creating a web based portal with web application feature. Millions of target user in my portal.
I want to store all login activity of all users as well as their all activity like add, modify, delete of records.
I am planning to store all information related to activity instead of DATABASE
I want to use XML file to store information.
If I am storing all information in Database then database size will be very high.
If I am wrong then give me some other suggestion.
I am using PHP and MySQL in my application.

Can I import certain tables from a remote database over SSH into the main database for a Wordpress install?

I would like to be able to sync certain tables from a remotely hosted database into a Wordpress database, these tables are not containing any related Wordpress content. These tables contain simple warranty lookup info that returns a simple yes/no if a specific serial number of a product is past the warranty date. I have SSH and privileges set up for this and my IP is whitelisted.
On the management side, the user enters this data into an internal system that pushes the information to their server hosting the database.
My goal is not to disrupt the system they are using and simply use a form on the site to access the lookup feature with the imported data from the external database. I hope this makes sense.
I appreciate any help or guidance in this.

Caching Wordpress price data in an Ionic App (before APK build)

I am pulling in some data to my Ionic App via the excellent Wordpress API that contains prices that update when the page is requested in Wordpress. However, if anyone uses my App offline they 1) Won't get updated prices and 2) The page will not load.
Is there any chance I could perhaps cache the entire app pre-build so at least they will have an actual page even if accessed offline?
NB - The Wordpress complex price data is fetched via PHP and would be difficult to incorporate into the app, so API is a good way (so far)
You could have the price data saved to local-storage then if there is a failure to connect have the code swap in the latest version that was saved. PouchDB is really useful for this.

Detect changes in database

I have Mobile App which updates MYSQL database. There are multiple users using this app. Our goal is to track changes made by these users and display it on a webpage.
I want to make a webpage in php where I can see stats.
So my question is how to detect changes in database (which are made through App) and display the 'Stats' of it on Webpage with the help of php?
Thanks

Build a survey system on top of google forms

We built a survey tool on top of google forms using wordpress.
Simply, you create a google form, create a private open link, put into a wordpress backend page, then the system processes the module server side and generates the necessary html file. When the user fills the form and sent it, via ajax the server use zend gdata to write the results on the spreadsheet connected to the form et voilat.
But this system is limited, also because google form is quite limited. We want to improve it.
That's why I'm asking your opinions to upgrade the system to have some more features:
We want to be able to keep the form open so that users can fill it in more than one occasion. theoretically then, we need to know which user the spreadsheet rows are connected to. This could be done by saving some sort of ID key to recognize the user, but then we don't know how to refill the fields in the form, since the spreadsheet created from the forms don't retain any sort of key to connect columns and form field.
We need more field types! like a file upload field that put the uploaded file in a specific gdrive folder.
We need to see the data for the single entry while google gives you only the whole spreadsheet that's quite hard to read.
It's not an easy task! Which solutions should we use to solve these problems?
Many thanks!
UPGRADE:
We decided to go by using a mix of google forms, google fusion tables, google charts via api access. Here's the simplified algorithm:
The admin user create his form via google forms and save the url. To have more field type, user can put a tag in the field comment, eg [file] for, well, files upload.
The url is put into an admin page of our system. The page fetch the content of the form page and extrapolate into an array, for every field, the title, the ID, the type and the comment; if there's some tag in the comment, this become the field type.
Using this data, system create if not existing a folder with a fusion table inside. if file fields are present, another subfolder is generated. Addresses of these folders and files is saved.
Using the array data, in the fusion table a column is created for each of the array fields, with a column title of this sort "[field_ID field_type]field_title", plus a column for the end user ID.
The admin user, can more over open or close the form.
When a user goes to the form page, the array is used to generate the form. If the system doesn't have in memory the user ID it means that the user has never filled up the form. Otherwise the system will use the user ID to fetch the data from the fusion table to populate the form.
When the user fills up the form, the entries are feed to the columns using the field ID as reference, plus the user ID. The user ID is also stored in the system the remember that the user already filled the form, as said in point 5. If files are uploaded, they are stored in a gdrive folder.
The admin user therefore can go to the admin page and see how many people has filled up the form, can ask for single user data, for summary data using google charts, can download a pdf of data from single user, every user, or summary.
Of course this is the idea, we have to build it. One first question is whether we should use javascript or php to communicate with google, so doing the processing on the client or server side...
If you're asking about Javascript vs PHP, you should know that the Javascript API can't write to a Google Spreadsheet because of Cross-Domain Security issues.
PHP can as it is a server side language. Zend Framework makes it easy to interact with Google Spreadsheets. http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.gdata.spreadsheets.html
So go with PHP if that was your question.

Categories