First some background.
I have a website that has outgrown its designed dimensions and is a huge burden to maintain. See PPBM5 Benchmark
There is a lot of maintenance work involved, so I'm investigating a PHP/MySQL approach to easen the burden and to add functionality to the site. With the current Excel based structure and over 420 entries, it is cumbersome for me to maintain, but also for users to find what they need.
A MySQL based dynamic structure is a lot easier and offers vastly more selection capabilities, like selecting only records that meet specific criteria.
Data submission is done with a form, that contains most of the relevant data, but the drawack is that people submitting their data are often not technically inclined, give wrong answers due to a lack of understanding or making typo's. The test results are attached in one or two separate .txt files, but often they have not read the instructions correctly or did something wrong, so these attached .txt files can not be trusted automatically, they have to be checked before inclusion.
These were my initial thoughts:
1. Data collection:
To see what I mean, run CPU-Z, go to the About tab and press the Save Report button and look at the results.
This can all be done without user intervention in an automatic way, but maybe I need to add an Auto-It file to the test to make it all run as desired.
If this works and I'm able to extract the relevant data from the created file and can insert it into the database, we may be in business for the next version of PPBM5.5 or PPBM6. It does require a modification to the instructions, making them a lot easier, because there is less data to fill out.
2. Data submission:
3. Adding to Database:
4. Publication of the database:
Queries should be possible on things like CPU (check box), so include 17-920, i7-930, i7-950 but exclude i7-980X and i7-990X, Size of memory (check box), Overclocked (boolean, yes, no), SSD as OS disk, and similar options.
The biggest problem is to keep the color grading and statistical indicators (Top, D9, Q3, Med, Q1 and D1) intact on dynamically generated queries. Say you make a query which results in 20 observations, this should show the related colors and legends. Next query results in 48 observations and of course the color grading and legends do need to reflect that. Question in my mind, does the RPI remain constant, independent of the query or does that need to be recalculated on the basis of the query?
Next thing is to allow a user to select a specific observation and by simply clicking on it be shown, in a separate window (detail page) or accordion, all the CPU-Z related information about the hardware.
The graphs, Top-20 and MPE Gains, need to be dynamically adjusted, based on the query used.
5. Ideally, external links:
is what I want to achieve.
This being my first exposure to PHP/MySQL, you can imagine I'm not clear on how to go from here.
Added complication is that I actually have 5 numbers to insert per record and two calculated fields, Total Score and RPI should be calculated fields. Haven't yet figured out how to handle calculated fields, maybe only in the PHP/HTML code and not in the database.
I hope someone can help me.
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Update: With a lot of manual labour I got all the existing data into the MySQL database and for new submissions it is now handled automatically.
Data are now automatically added to the database like this:
and the individual results are reported back to the submitter.
Two major hurdles to take now:
1. Importing 'old' - non-form based - submissions into the database, and
2. Designing the pages to access the database.
After that, it is all cosmetics. Adding the statistical measures and color gradients, based on the query, etc.
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