MutantJohn Posted August 11, 2015 Share Posted August 11, 2015 Hey everyone, So, I'm trying to use PHP to create a file explorer. The gist is, given a target home directory for a user, I want to generate a list of the contents. I want directories to be "click-able" in the sense that if you click on a directory entry, it'll expand/collapse its contents. It should look like this : - file0 - file1 - file2 - dir0 (clickable) - subfile0 -subfile1 -subfile2 My idea to do this was to use an unordered list with checkboxes for each directory entry. I would then use JS to add event listeners to each checkbox which makes a XMLHttpRequest to an appropriate PHP file which then echoes back the appropriate HTML and the JS then receives that info and appends it to the page. This way, the user can explore their entire filesystem and the server doesn't kill itself trying to recursively search the entire directory (imagine if a user had like 50,000 files or something) to generate the list. Actually, is PHP fast enough that I don't even have to worry about this? By this I mean, building the entire file list first, formatting it as HTML and then echo'ing it back? If it is, awesome! If not, I'm curious why my input tags keep lacking text content! Here's the code : <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <body> <?php // grab the user's home directory $home = "dita-ot/dita-ot-2.1.0/samples/"; // loop contents and write to page if ( is_dir( $home ) ) { if ( $dh = opendir( $home ) ) { $dom = new DOMDocument( "1.0" ); $form = $dom->createElement( "form" ); $ul = $dom->createElement( "ul" ); /* http://php.net/manual/en/function.readdir.php */ /* This is the correct way to loop over the directory. */ while ( false !== ( $entry = readdir( $dh ) ) ) { if ( $entry == "." || $entry == ".." ) continue; $li = $dom->createElement( "li" ); if ( is_dir( $home . $entry ) ) { $input = $dom->createElement( "input", $entry ); $input_type = $dom->createAttribute( "type" ); $input_type->value = "checkbox"; $input->appendChild( $input_type ); // this is where the problem is // why is there no inner text content? $li->appendChild( $input ); } else { $li->nodeValue = $entry; } $ul->appendChild( $li ); } $form->appendChild( $ul ); $dom->appendChild( $form ); echo $dom->saveHTML(); closedir( $dh ); } } ?> </body> </html> Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
ginerjm Posted August 11, 2015 Share Posted August 11, 2015 Is there some reason behind using dom to build your page instead of just echo'ing the html you need to display this? And why does it have to be ajax? As for the clickable things - output your list elements as simple text values but when one of them is a directory name output it as an anchor tag inside of a list element. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518501 Share on other sites More sharing options...
MutantJohn Posted August 11, 2015 Author Share Posted August 11, 2015 Is there some reason behind using dom to build your page instead of just echo'ing the html you need to display this? And why does it have to be ajax? As for the clickable things - output your list elements as simple text values but when one of them is a directory name output it as an anchor tag inside of a list element. I figured DOM was the most "proper" way of building HTML. It seems very similar in syntax to JavaScript and things like jsoup. And AJAX is more conditional. My fear is that a user will select a directory with an amazingly complex structure underneath. Imagine something in the tens of GB worth of files and directories. I'm scared that if I use PHP to recreate the entire structure and convert it to HTML, the process will be slow. So I figured AJAX would be an awesome way of allowing a user to navigate this huge file structure while being performant, i.e. the server only generates the structure HTML upon user request. This way I could avoid the potentially huge costs of generating the entire file structure HTML. I like your idea about the anchor tags though. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518503 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ginerjm Posted August 11, 2015 Share Posted August 11, 2015 Well the anchor tags are the natural way to do it. How else are you going to generate a click? As for your concern about resource usage - a simple glob will tell you what the contents of a dir are and how many entries there are so what is the concern? As for the 'complex structure' you are only going to load one dir for a click - any dirs below that one will still show up as anchor tags with no details beneath them - yet. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518504 Share on other sites More sharing options...
MutantJohn Posted August 11, 2015 Author Share Posted August 11, 2015 Interesting... I'm reading up on glob() now and it seems like scandir() might be more appropriate. Hold on, I'm going to go back to back to this and see if I can't come up with some illustrative code! Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518505 Share on other sites More sharing options...
QuickOldCar Posted August 11, 2015 Share Posted August 11, 2015 glob() or scandir() would be the better way. You could even use stat(), fileperms(), fileowner() or other functions to show the user only files that have a certain permission or belong to that user. Echo html out, no need to use dom. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518509 Share on other sites More sharing options...
MutantJohn Posted August 11, 2015 Author Share Posted August 11, 2015 Interesting... Is using DOM frowned upon by the PHP community? I'm honestly asking as I'm kind of PHP noob. Or is it just not what I actually need in this case (i.e. I'm not fully utilizing the potential of the DOM object)? Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518528 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ginerjm Posted August 11, 2015 Share Posted August 11, 2015 Dom is great if you are using JS to modify the current page in real-time. But from a PHP script that is literally building a webpage, there is no need to do things the hard way. Just echo out the html you need. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518532 Share on other sites More sharing options...
MutantJohn Posted August 12, 2015 Author Share Posted August 12, 2015 Hmm.. Fair enough. I guess it would be kind of easier to just write out the HTML lol XD So, is there ever a good usage for the DOM stuff? Eh, I guess it'd be good to use if I'm attempting to traverse the DOM or an XML doc. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518554 Share on other sites More sharing options...
QuickOldCar Posted August 12, 2015 Share Posted August 12, 2015 So, is there ever a good usage for the DOM stuff? Eh, I guess it'd be good to use if I'm attempting to traverse the DOM or an XML doc. That's the best time to use it. I use DOM a lot in api's, crawling, scraping or data parsing. A lot of times I combine DOM and SimpleXML. 1 Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518556 Share on other sites More sharing options...
MutantJohn Posted August 12, 2015 Author Share Posted August 12, 2015 Not gonna lie, I normally only really post on the C programming board but, man, you guys are awesome! I'm really digging the quality of these forums. Thanks, everyone! I'm probably going to be posting a bit more in the future. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/297739-need-help-using-php-to-generate-html/#findComment-1518610 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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