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Fatal error: session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module:

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:14:39 +0000

If you get this error:
Fatal error: session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module:
The solution is changing your current php.ini settings for session.save_handler user to session.save_handler files.

Edit your php.ini file from:

[Session]
; Handler used to store/retrieve data.
session.save_handler = user

[Session]
; Handler used to store/retrieve data.
session.save_handler = files

If you do not have access to the php.ini file, you may try an alternate .htaccess rewrite method. Edit your .htaccess and place the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
php_value session.save_handler files

Excel and PHP

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:12:05 +0000

From Office 97 version, the World famous spreadsheet can read html table’s like a spreadsheet rows and colums.
With this interesting feature we can create .xls file on the fly from php with a simple play of

html tag.

Here the code


    $filename="spreadsheet.xls";
    header ("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
    header ("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=$filename");
?>



My XLS title



    for ($i=1;$i < 100; $i++)
    {
        echo "";for($j=1;$j<100;$j++){$a=$i*$j;echo"";}echo"";}?>

          
        
                
             $a

With line 3 we exchange the html data to excel
With line 4 we download the file insted of open ino the browser

as you can see, you can play with the table and collect data from a database, for generate some .xls spreadsheet on the fly, with the data you want for specific user, or specific situations.

MySQL sample connection

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:07:14 +0000

Pre-requisites:
Database host or IP
Database name
Username and password access of db.

First we need to declare some critical data like username and password, so i strongly recommended to store this value into a different file where php will ask tables and data, this for security reason.

In the php convension, usually we make a file called config.inc.php, because the .inc between the file name and real extension, dont show nothing if directly called to your browser.

Let’s make this file usually called config.inc.php

      
      //database parameters
      $db_host = "localhost"; //usually localhost, but can be an IP
      $db_user = "myusername";
      $db_password = "mypassword";
      $db_name = "mydatabasename";
      ?>

Now we must pass to php this values, if you are planning a project, usually is a good idea to make next step to a file called database.php and perform the connection.

      
      include("config.inc.php");
      //now check our usr/pass credentials
      $db = mysql_connect($db_host, $db_user, $db_password);
      if ($db == FALSE)
      die ("put here an error message");
 
      //now we see if database name can be read/write
      mysql_select_db($db_name, $db)
      or die ("ERROR: your parameteres are wrong");
      ?>

With mysql_connect your have ask a connection to database server with your username and password, usually on shared service, your credentials give access to one database, so the server must reply if you have a valid account on it. Be careful, the variables $db_host, $db_user, $db_password must be passed in the order of example above.

With mysq_select_db you ask the permission to read/write on database name, with previous credentials.
Both functions are native PHP functions, and they can perform only a TRUE or FALSE, no database data is exchanged yet.