In this episode I’ll add a feature to allow users to submit their own blog to the blogroll. Of course you wouldn’t want people just adding entries and them going live so I’ll also update the blogroll table with an is_approved field. That way you will have control over who gets in and who doesn’t.

Here is the updated Blogroll.php file used in this example. Note: I added a bit to the userAddBlog() method to send an email to the administrator any time an blog entry is added – commented out – and also used mysql_real_escape_string() to prevent code injection.

Don’t forget to update your blogroll table with the is_approved field and then set all existing rows to 1 with: UPDATE `blogroll` SET `is_approved` = 1;

Addendum: I forgot to add this to the video but the getBlogrollByPage() and getBlogrollCount() methods also need a slight update so that they will only select entries that have been approved. They now look like this:

function getBlogrollByPage( $start, $count ) {
	$sql = 	"SELECT * FROM `blogroll`
				WHERE `is_approved` = 1
				LIMIT ".$start.", ".$count;

	return mysql_query( sprintf( $sql ) );
}

function getBlogrollCount() {
	$sql = 	"SELECT COUNT(*) AS 'count'
				FROM `blogroll`
				WHERE `is_approved` = 1;";

	return mysql_query( sprintf( $sql ) );
}

The is_approved = 1 makes sure that only those blogs that have been approved by the administrator will show up.

( Visit the video index. )

Up till now we’ve been downloading the entire contents of the blogroll table. Now it’s time to add paging so that only a few entries are returned from the database at a time. To do that I’ll show you how to send variables to the PHP code and use them to manipulate the data that is selected.

We’ll be expanding on the code from the previous 3 videos. ( Visit the video index. )

Here in part 3 of this series we’ll create a DataGroup to display the buttons inside an ItemRenderer. ( Video Tutorial Index page ) This won’t mean much to you if you’re working in the Flash IDE, without the Flex framework, but it does provide a quick glance into the workflow of displaying data in a Flex based app.

We’ll be working with the code expanded upon in the previous two videos in this series.

In the previous video tutorial in this series we managed to get as far as getting the data from the database to our application. Here we’ll collect the data and prepare to dispatch that to the view where it can be displayed.

The code from the previous video tutorial will get you through this one.

The application that we’ll create together here is very simple. However the tools that you’ll learn here can be used to create an app of incredible complexity.

Here is a look at the finished app. Simple as it is it does cover the essentials of database driven apps:

• Retrieving data from a database
• Passing variables to the server to modify the MySQL code
• Modifying data in the database
• Adding new data to the database

Here in part one I’ll show you how to set up Flash Builder or your Flash IDE to get started using AMFPHP to connect your Flash based app with a database. I assume that you already have a local server running that can support PHP and you have AMFPHP on that server. If not then check out this short video tutorial on setting up AMFPHP.

Here’s the source code that you’ll need for this project.