High-score list using PHP - Page 2

Calling it

Okay, so now you want to do something with the highscore table. Well, the simplest thing to do is display the list in a web browser.

The following,

http://www.myscore.com/scores.php?filename=scores/score.sco&scoresize=10&action=VIEW&viewtype=HTML

when placed in the address bar at the top of a web browser, and run for the first time, will produce a table containing our highscore list. The table will appear like so:

When you run that command for the first time, the file that stores the scores will be created. This file is a simple text file that uses special PHP encoded strings to store our data. We are passing several values to the PHP script itself.

• filename: This is the name of the file, including path, that will store the scores for a game. For example, for a game called "Funhouse" you would set filename to be scores/funhouse.sco. The name is up to you, but use a different name for different games.
• scoresize: This is the number of scores to keep in the list. In the above example, we are using a 10 score database, so scoresize is equal to 10.
• action: The action parameter is very important. It can be set to INSERT, CLEAR, or VIEW. When it's set to VIEW, then our PHP script simply reads the list from the database and makes no changes. When action is set to CLEAR, all the entries in the table are cleared (name=none, score=0). I'll get to INSERT in a minute.
• viewtype: This parameter can be set to either "HTML" or "FLASH". When it's set to HTML, then it returns the formatted table displayed above. However, when it's set to FLASH, then it returns a stream of Flash variables.

Let's try the command like so:

http://www.myscore.com/scores.php?filename=scores/score.sco&scoresize=10&action=VIEW&viewtype=FLASH

When this is placed in the address bar of a web browser, the following string is returned:

NAME0=none&SCORE0=0&NAME1=none&SCORE1=0&NAME2=none&SCORE2=0&

etc... up to

NAME9=none&SCORE9=0&

This happens to be the way Flash expects variables to be returned to it in order to use them properly.