Every once in a while I get a project that at first sounds completely impossible. But, with a little ingenuity, some long hours, and a whole lot of creativity sometimes the solution is pure genius.

Long time friends and clients Total Outdoor Adventures (http://toaltd.com) were starting the show season and needed to be able to book hunters, have their contracts calculated with the hunts and all the fees, and then be able to fee that information to their website backend for the office staff and sales reps to deal with. The trick . . . the internet is expensive at the shows so they needed to be able to do it offline and then publish the new contract when they had an internet connection.

After scratching my head for a while and pondering how long it would take (and how incredibly expensive) to create a desktop app to do this for them, I started my trusty WAMP server to fix a problem on their website and do some testing before I updated the live site. If you are clever you are already one step ahead.

Yes! I made a copy of the tables they needed, some of the backend pages, and created a contract management website using the exact same table structure they needed for the web. Using a few really nice php FTP commands I set up a publish method that dumped the data that needed to be sent to an sql file, sent it to their server, and then called a page on the server that used some nice MYSQL queries to import and update the data on the server database. I couldn’t stop there. I knew they would need some tweaks so also created a download that would grab an xml list of files to grab from a locaton on the server and overwrite them on the local machines.

Did I also mention that a copy of FPDF prints the contract to PDF while offline?

A quick installation of WAMP, import of the database, copy over the web files and an offline contract generator was born. Way too easy!