First of all - I know this is an entirely subjective question, and I know there's no single approach to learning this technology. I'm just looking for a few hints from seasoned professionals basically whether Dreamweaver verbose code (at least it looks like that to me at this beginning point) is all 'needed & necessary'... I have a background using ColdFusion, however I am new to php / mySQL. I am caught between two learning approaches: 1 - I know that generally, it is better to build my knowledge from the 'bottom up' - coding by hand from books and such etc. - and so far I have been doing that with php and mySQL. Slowly I am getting there. Php is quite powerful and impressive. 2 - Dreamweaver cs3 is pretty cool. Creating recordsets - dynamic data - updating records etc. is pretty seductive it seems to work well. A few questions: One of my issues is that the Dreamweaver code that gets created seems quite verbose and somewhat complex (like using switch & case in a simple query listed below...), therefore even harder for this newbie to try to learn from. My question is this: Is this Dreamweaver code actually all modern/necessary (vs a 'simple approach') - or is it way over the top? Without getting too detailed: - If in fact you folks say that most of the DW approach (for those that have seen it) is 'necessary' & 'the right way to do things' - then I will be happy to use it and try to figure out some of its complexities . But, if you think that DW is over the the top ('...I don't use all that suff - I do a query in just a few lines!') ... then I'll just start with the 'bottom up - code by hand - do it yourself simple approach'. BTW: if anyone wants to see more DW code - email me off-list - I'll be happy to send more examples... (I don't want to clog up this cool list) BTW: I also tried a happy medium - simplifying the DW code - however that will break its usefulness in DW - and other DW interface items stop working, so I guess that's not an option right now. Interested in your thoughts... Dave ------------------------ Example get recordset query w DW: <?php require_once('../Connections/weblink.php'); ?> <?php if (!function_exists("GetSQLValueString")) { function GetSQLValueString($theValue, $theType, $theDefinedValue = "", $theNotDefinedValue = "") { $theValue = get_magic_quotes_gpc() ? stripslashes($theValue) : $theValue; $theValue = function_exists("mysql_real_escape_string") ? mysql_real_escape_string($theValue) : mysql_escape_string($theValue); switch ($theType) { case "text": $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? "'" . $theValue . "'" : "NULL"; break; case "long": case "int": $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? intval($theValue) : "NULL"; break; case "double": $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? "'" . doubleval($theValue) . "'" : "NULL"; break; case "date": $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? "'" . $theValue . "'" : "NULL"; break; case "defined": $theValue = ($theValue != "") ? $theDefinedValue : $theNotDefinedValue; break; } return $theValue; } } $colname_get_Recordset1 = "-1"; if (isset($_SESSION['mem_id'])) { $colname_get_Recordset1 = $_SESSION['mem_id']; } mysql_select_db($database_weblink, $weblink); $query_get_Recordset1 = sprintf("SELECT * FROM tbl_test WHERE mem_id = %s ORDER BY mem_id ASC", GetSQLValueString($colname_get_Recordset1, "int")); $get_Recordset1 = mysql_query($query_get_Recordset1, $weblink) or die(mysql_error()); $row_get_Recordset1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($get_Recordset1); $totalRows_get_Recordset1 = mysql_num_rows($get_Recordset1); ?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>Untitled Document</title> </head> <body> </body>Remember </html> <?php mysql_free_result($get_Recordset1); ?> -- Thanks - RevDave Cool @ hosting4days . com [db-lists] -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php