如何创建已保存文件名的列表？

Question

I'm working on page where you can generate word document with items for customers. There is a tab called "Latest generated documents". How to save each generated document name and add it to list? Should I use array?

To define file name I'm using this code:

$filename = "".$name." ".$surname."_report.docx";

Name and surname depends on what customer I choose when I'm creating a document. The file is saved to folder "documents" but each time file is overwritten with new.

Answer 1

If you don't overwrite the files you could scan your directory and add each found file into an array, an other approach would be to store the filenames in a database.

$data = scandir($path_to_directory);
foreach($data as $file) {
   // display filename
}

1) Create a document for your user

2) Insert the name of the file in your database and perhaps also the time the file was created/inserted

3) When you should display latest generated documents you query your database for these filenames sorted on created DESC

like this for example:

$documents = array();
$query = "SELECT * FROM tbl_document ORDER BY doc_created DESC";
if(($result = mysql_query($query))) {
    while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
        $documents[] = $row;
     }
     mysql_free_result($result);
 }

Now you have an array with the latest documents that you can display to the user, I think you also want to remove records from the database depending on the value of doc_created.

 // the following query will remove documents older than 1 hour from the database
 mysql_query("DELETE FROM tbl_document WHERE 
              UNIX_TIMESTAMP(doc_created) < ".(time()-(60*60)));

The above assumes you have created a table that looks something like this:

 CREATE TABLE tbl_document (
    doc_id int(11) unsigned NOT NULL PRIMARY_KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    doc_filename VARCHAR(260) NOT NULL,
    doc_created TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
 );