ITEC 325 2012spring ibarland

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hw02
Forms

Due: 2012.Feb.18 (Sun) 13:00

Scenario

You are working for Lizard Entertainment, makers of the popular adventure game, .World of Wowcraft (“.W.o.W.”). In .W.o.W., players choose a type of character: either warrior, mage, priest, or rogue. Over the course of the game, their characters can learn various skills, depending on type: For example, the diplomacy skill (which is learnable only by rogues and priests), or the acrobatics skill (which is learnable only by rogues and warriors), etc.. Each skill is be tied to one of six built-in character traits: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. Finally, each skill has a minimum-level (between 30 and 100 inclusive).

Your boss decides that a key feature of the game is that people can add their own skills to the game. Your job is to build a web-page that lets people enter new skills for the game to use. People will enter the name of the skill, a detailed description, which character-types can use it, what trait it's tied to, and their own name (to get the glory). When they submit their form, they will see a response page summarizing the information they entered.

An example of filling out skill-form.php	The result of submitting skill-form.php

Your assignment

• (30pts) For this homework, build two PHP pages, skill-form.php and skill-handle.php. The PHP documents must be present in your RU account with permissions set so I can access the form at https://php.radford.edu/~userid/itec325/hw02/skill-form.php.

  Your pages don't need to look identical to the above images, but should look well-organized, typo-free, etc. When I grade, it will be from the mindset of a small-company owner who has hired you to create my web-site. … A grumpy, perfectionist small-company owner.

  You do not (yet) need to validate any data (including the minimum level being between 30 and 100); we'll add that over the next few assignments. However, do make sure that any special characters like < or & are handled correctly (that is, the displayed description shows those characters, without any markup), and that newlines are preserved. (Remember the text functions htmlspecialchars and nl2br.)

• (10pts) Define a css class “important” that centers its text and puts a green border around the item; use this for the page's title (which might be in an h1 tag). Similarly, define a css class “additional-info” that has font-size: smaller and font-style: italic. Use this for both the page's signature at the bottom, and reminder information about the restriction on min-level.

• (10pts) Include a function which takes in an array of strings, and returns a single, long string: a comma-separated list of all individual strings.
  (Include at least three test cases, each testing a different situation.)

• (15pts) Include a function which takes in (a) an array of strings (checkbox-descriptions), and (b) a group-name and returns a string that happens to be valid html for a table-of-checkboxes.

  For example, the checkboxes( 'family', array('Brother', 'Sister', 'Pet') ) would return html which renders as something like:

  Brother
  Sister
  Pet

  
  Include at least two test cases; you'll probably want to write the necessary html table by hand, to serve as your expected-output.

  Hint: I found my solution to actually be simpler by making a second helper function that only had two worry about creating a single row. I could copy/paste the test cases for the single-row helper function to the overall table function, so it didn't take much extra work. (and, in fact, helped me clarify to myself what whitespace I wanted in my html-source).

  5pts extra credit: Have your function use non-numeric keys as checkbox's value attribute, and allow passing in a third argument: a string to use as the class attribute.
  (For full extra credit, make this an optional argument, and don't include any class attribute if it's not passed in.)

• (10pts) Also, have a file index.php that uses a php function you've written to print (not return), for each of the three files in your homework:

  1. the name of the file and a link to it,
  2. the file's last-modified time (see filemtime),
  and
  3. that file's source (if between the due date and May 31), or a message along the lines of "this file's source only available between 2012-Feb-17 13:00 and 2011-May-31 23:59."
     (Recall the functions strtotime and date.)

Other requirements

• Each file start should start with with a PHP or HTML comment with your name, class, etc. (after a doctype declaration and perhaps <html>).
• Use meaningful variable names, function names, and good comments as needed.
• Write functions (both php and javascript) as appropriate, to avoid repeated work.
  I recommend writing functions that return strings rather than print (as convenient¹), and including one or two test-cases as examples. Writing the test-case first often clarifies exactly what your code needs to return.
• Use standard XHTML tags and make sure any javascript does not use browser-specific constructs.
• All code/html should be well formatted with appropriate white space and indentation so it is easy to read.
• Strive to minimize lines that wrap.
• If you have any questions, use the discussion board.
• Do not modify your final submission after the due-date; if you want to make changes, copy all your files to a new directory and work on those.

Do not delay starting this program! I suggest: complete at least 40pts by the end of this weekend, and 50 pts by Wednesday, and the rest by Friday.
(Also: check your program/html in small bits — don't write huge amounts of the assignment w/o even running it.)

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©2011, Ian Barland, Radford University Last modified 2012.Feb.10 (Fri)

Please mail any suggestions (incl. typos, broken links) to ibarlandradford.edu