Pull mySQL data via PHP into an array of Javascript objects

Question

i am trying in pull my data from mySQL and convert it to a format I can then pass to google.maps API. I am thinking mySQL -> php -> javascript -> google.maps makes the most sense but am deffinitly open to other suggestions.

So far I have connected to and successfully queried my data into an array

<?php
//library of mysql functions including linkDB()
  include('../sqlFunctions/sqlFunctions.php');

//Establish connection to database
  if($link = linkDB()){
    echo "connected to DB";
  }

//set up a MySQL query.  I am simply pulling geocoordinate ints, strings and boolean.
  $sql = "SELECT title
            ,lat
            ,lng
            ,titleYou
            ,descriptionAre
            ,privacyRockstar
      FROM shelters;";

  if($results = $link->query($sql)){
    echo "<p>Query succsessful.</p>";
  }else{
    echo "Query Failed";
  }

//initialize an array to store data
  $rows = array();

    while ($data = $results->fetch_assoc()) {
      $rows[] = $data;

      echo "<br><br>Loop rotation: ";
      var_dump($data);
    }

    echo "<br><p>The End of The Loop<p><br>";
    var_dump($rows);
?>

Now I just need to convert this data into something usable I can pass to google.maps.

Before I was pulling JSON from a text file, which worked, but I want to flexibility and stability of a database. It was easy to parse into and array of Javascript Objects. Then I could just call the index and the property that I needed as you can see from this function I was using.

function setMarkers(){
    for(i=0; i < jsonParsed.arrayOfObjs.length; i++){

//setting parameters to hand to google
      var markerOptions = {
        position : jsonParsed.arrayOfObjs[i].position,
        map : mapCanvas,
        description : jsonParsed.arrayOfObjs[i].title,
        icon: 'http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/ms/icons/blue-dot.png',
      };

    //create marker
    this ['marker' + i] = new google.maps.Marker(markerOptions);
    }
  }

Thank you for any light you can help shed on my issue.

Answer 1

It sounds like you already found your answer but I'll post for completeness.

Simply change your the var_dump($rows) line to json_encode($rows).

Read more about json_encode in the php docs.

You probably want to have two php files:

• api.php file that emits Content-type: application/json
• index.php file that emits Content-type: text/html and calls api.php

On the index page, you can make an AJAX call to your API endpoint and then use JSON.parse(response).