A Poll/Rating system in PHP and MySQL

Before you start this lesson, please read the following lessons for your reference:

• Using phpMyAdmin Create Database
• Insert Form Data into Database
• Retrieve data from Database

This lesson will show you how to create a simple poll/rating system in PHP and MySQL. The could be used for any number of items you want to rate without changing a bit.

You may use it to do opinion poll, rate your software,images, news, music,anything.

Here is the example:

This tutorial includes 3 sections:

1. Create database : how to save polling/rating results in MySQL
2. Dealing poll/rate Form: how to saving polling/rating result to database and how to set cookie to prevent client repeat voting on the same item.
3. Retrieve poll/rate result: retrieve poll/rate result for item and assign corresponding poll/rate icon to it.

Poll/Rating Form

The code for Poll/Rating form (shown in above example) is the following:

<form method="post" action="vote.php">
<select name="select" size="1">
<option value="-1">Please select one</option>
<option value="5">Excellent</option>
<option value="4">Very good</option>
<option value="3">Good</option>
<option value="2">Fair</option>
<option value="1">Bad</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" name="vote" value="Vote">
<input name="itemid" type="hidden" id="itemid" value="1">
</form>

The form could be put besides any item you want to rate. Just change that hidden field "itemid" value to its proper id and make sure that id exists in database.

Dealing with vote result

vote.php is dealing with result.

vote.php did 3 things:

• validate input
• retrieve old polling/voting result
• saving new polling/voting result

First, vote.php did a simple validation. If user didn't make selection, it will prompt "Please go back and select one rating option" and exit program.

In order to get correct voting result, vote.php pulls out the old voting result by using query "select votes,result from polling where itemid=$id"

The new result is calculated by the formula:

$newResult=($oldVote*$oldResult+$votevalue)/$newVote;

The last step is to save the new voting result back to database. "update polling set votes=$newVote,result=$newResult where itemid=$id" did this chore for you.

Set cookie

You probably don't want a single user to vote on one item again and again and again. It might waste your bandwidth and trash your voting schism.

In order to prevent someone trashing your system, you may set cookie to control how often a user could vote on the same item.

The lesson "Set cookie and delete cookie" has more detail about how to set cookie. We just brief it here:

setcookie("vote1","v",time()+30*24*60*60); //expire after 30 days.

$_COOKIE("vote1");

Suppose cookie name is the format: vote+item id. It means cookie name for item 2 is vote2 and so on.

So, in vote.php, we may first check if the user had voted on this item or not by checking on his cookie. If there is a cookie, discard his voting. Otherwise, save voting result to database and set a cookie.

isset($_COOKIE['vote$id']) checks on cookie setting.

setcookie("vote$id","v",time()+30*24*60*60); sets the cookie expired in 30 days.

After adding cookie validation vote.php could look like this: