 | Level: Intermediate (syakovac@gmail.com), Software engineer, Freelance
03 Apr 2007 This six-part series demonstrates how to leverage the power of XForms in conjunction with MySQL and PHP for support processing to create an online accounting tool called X-Trapolate. Every good programming technology possesses a range of problems it excels at solving. The series highlights some of the problems that the XForms solves effectively, such as the need for live calculations and greater interactivity. Part 3 of this six-part series demonstrates how to leverage the power of XForms in conjunction with PHP and MySQL to create some tools for interacting with the data of day-to-day business. Budgeting and billing forms, which we'll build into X-Trapolate in this tutorial, demonstrate some powerful features of XForms, while also highlighting the boundary where XForms development becomes difficult.
Prerequisites
This tutorial uses a MySQL database for storage and reference. Necessary SQL commands appear throughout the article, but require a working knowledge of MySQL. PHPMyAdmin offers equivalent access to configure the MySQL database and view the entries from a menu-driven graphical interface. Though the purpose of the series is to educate the reader about the use of XForms, some background knowledge is expected of the reader. There are some very good articles and introductory series concerning XForms available on developerWorks. XForms is built on XML, and, hence, a basic understanding of XML is also assumed. Other technologies and concepts may also be involved, but they will be to a much lesser extent and should be inconsequential to the reader's comprehension of the topic.
System requirements
- A browser capable of displaying XForms, such as Firefox 2.0.1.
- A Web server with PHP enabled, such as WAMP
- An SQL server, MySQL, which is part of the WAMP package in this case.
Duration
1 hour
Formats html, pdf
About this tutorial
Nearly every profitable business implements some notion of billing management. The example business demonstrating the functionality for this tutorial (we will create a budgeting tool for X-Trapolate) operates under the assumption that customers make orders that consist of separate items and that each item comes from a specific department. Each order comes from a single invoice and the income from each item attributed to a department directly contributes to that department's profit. Each department also makes purchases of equipment that contributes to the expenses for that department. The budgeting process allows management to create and destroy departments and sub-departments and to change each department's planned profit and planned expenses or to compare the planned profits and expenses against the current totals as determined by the recorded orders and expenses.
The billing tool, that will also be created in this tutorial, attempts to serve as a mechanism for the billing staff to generate bills for customer accounts, print receipts, or send accounts to collections. The database of contacts originally referenced in the last tutorial of this series, after enhancements, contains information adequate for billing and can be queried for that information. Additionally, identification numbers link the accounts with individual orders and with payments.
| | | |
