Send data from javascript to a mysql database

Question

I have this little click counter. I would like to include each click in a mysql table. Can anybody help?

var count1 = 0;
function countClicks1() {
count1 = c         


        

Answer 1

JavaScript, as defined in your question, can't directly work with MySql. This is because it isn't running on the same computer.

JavaScript runs on the client side (in the browser), and databases usually exist on the server side. You'll probably need to use an intermediate server-side language (like PHP, Java, .Net, or a server-side JavaScript stack like Node.js) to do the query.

Here's a tutorial on how to write some code that would bind PHP, JavaScript, and MySql together, with code running both in the browser, and on a server:

http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_ajax_database.asp

And here's the code from that page. It doesn't exactly match your scenario (it does a query, and doesn't store data in the DB), but it might help you start to understand the types of interactions you'll need in order to make this work.

In particular, pay attention to these bits of code from that article.

Bits of Javascript:

xmlhttp.open("GET","getuser.php?q="+str,true);
xmlhttp.send();

Bits of PHP code:

mysql_select_db("ajax_demo", $con);
$result = mysql_query($sql);
// ...
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result)
mysql_close($con);

Also, after you get a handle on how this sort of code works, I suggest you use the jQuery JavaScript library to do your AJAX calls. It is much cleaner and easier to deal with than the built-in AJAX support, and you won't have to write browser-specific code, as jQuery has cross-browser support built in. Here's the page for the jQuery AJAX API documentation.

The code from the article

HTML/Javascript code:

Select a person:
Peter Griffin
Lois Griffin
Glenn Quagmire
Joseph Swanson




Person info will be listed here.

PHP code:

Firstname
Lastname
Age
Hometown
Job
";

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {
  echo "";
  echo "" . $row['FirstName'] . "";
  echo "" . $row['LastName'] . "";
  echo "" . $row['Age'] . "";
  echo "" . $row['Hometown'] . "";
  echo "" . $row['Job'] . "";
  echo "";
  }
echo "";

mysql_close($con);
?>