Need help posting info to a web server

Does it support MySQL, CGI and Perl? If so, I'll throw something your way, including a MySQL schema. If not, maybe I'll code something in PHP to match the schema. It's dead simple.

If you don't have access to MySQL, then your options pretty much suck all around anyway (I guess you could use the built in SQLite functionality in PHP5).

Hi, I'll find out!

- Joel

Ok, here we go:

# PHP 5
# Perl 5.8.7
# MySQL 4.1

Wow, thanks for all that! What is the UUID for, is it just to prevent simultanious access to the same record?

- Joel

"jbrave" wrote:
Wow, thanks for all that! What is the UUID for, is it just to prevent simultanious access to the same record?

Simply a unique identifier per channel run. I generate it on channel start, and use the same one until the channel stops. You can then link together records submitted by the same run of the channel (same user is implied by that). I used a similar method when storing duration counters for KidPaint (which this was hastily adapted from originally). The time counter kept advancing, but as long as the UUID was the same, I could tell it was the same run of the channel. I could also do a search for unique UUIDs to determine how many different runs of the channel there were. Just using the IP address isn't sufficient, as many people have multiple Rokus on the same public IP, and many ISPs provide proxies which may lump many requests to the same IP.

I've been working on this for quite a few hours now - now I no longer get database connect errors, but I'm getting an "error saving data" output from the script. At the moment, i"m just using curl -d to post from the command line. Nothing is being inserted into the database, I've got the dbname and the table name correct.

The post:

curl -d "channel=mychannelname&uuid=13594446900000&key=195158&value=http%3A%2F%2Fasdf.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ftf%2F001%2F396%2F124%2F30204.64k.m4a" http://www.myserver.com/badm4a.php

Error saving data!

<?php

// Define settings
$dbserver = "mysql"; // Change as required
$dbname   = "mydbname";  // Whatever DB you have access to
$dbuser   = "myusername";  // User to connect to DB as
$dbpass   = "mypassword";// Password for DB user

// Connect to DB
$dbconn = mysql_connect("mysql","myusername","mypassword");
if (!$dbconn) die("Error connecting to database!");
if (!mysql_select_db($dbname)) die("Error selecting database $dbname");

// Get args
$channel = !empty($_REQUEST['channel']) ? mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST['channel']) : "";
$uuid    = !empty($_REQUEST['uuid'])    ? mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST['uuid'])    : "";
$key     = !empty($_REQUEST['key'])     ? mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST['key'])     : "";
$value   = !empty($_REQUEST['value'])   ? mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST['value'])   : "";
$ip      = mysql_real_escape_string($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

// Verify args
if (empty($channel)) die("Missing or invalid paramater 1");
if (empty($uuid) or !preg_match('/^[0-9a-f]{32}$/i',$uuid)) die("Missing or invalid paramater 2");
if (empty($key)) die("Missing or invalid paramater 3");
if (empty($value)) die("Missing or invalid paramater 4");

// Store data
$insert_sql = "INSERT INTO storedata (`time`, `channel`, `ip`, `uuid`, `key`, `value`) VALUES (NOW(),'$channel','$ip','$uuid','$key','$value')";
$result = mysql_query($insert_sql); // Stupid default PHP mysql functions without binding...
if (!$result) die("Error saving data!");

print "Data saved";
?>

Hmm, did you create the database table with the create statement I posted?

I purposefully left the error messages vague, but you can try replacing

if (!$result) die("Error saving data!");

with

if (!$result) die(mysql_errno($link) . ": " . mysql_error($link));

That will display the actual error mysql is returning, and may be helpful.

I only have phpmyadmin on this system so I created the table manually based on the statement syntax you posted. I'll try swapping in that error code you posted.

Ok, finally got it working!

Thanks!

- Joel

"jbrave" wrote:
Ok, finally got it working!

No problem!