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22.1.1 Analysis: what makes a web poll?

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The goal of a web poll is to give your users the chance to register their views on your site. Although they do not need to be powered by a database, it is the fastest and easiest way of handling it. At the simplest level, we would need to store in our database a list of all questions, their possible answers, as well as the number of times each answer has been voted for.

In database terms that equates to a table that looks like this:

Question	CHAR(255)
Answer1	CHAR(255)
Answer2	CHAR(255)
Answer3	CHAR(255)
Answer1_Votes	INT
Answer2_Votes	INT
Answer3_Votes	INT

From a PHP programming perspective we need two scripts - one to display the poll and give the user the chance to vote, and the other to capture the vote choice and display the results. We're not doing anything fancy right now, so when voting we will simply pass a number (1, 2, or 3) and the vote ID. The results page will then take that number and add one to the vote count for that answer.

<< 22.1 Creating a poll		22.1.2 Development: creating the simplest poll >>
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