Member Avatar for Alican_2

Hello, I want to display the results of the relevant student by querying the student's number from the site, the student exam results that come as a PDF file.

Is there a wordpress plugin that can do this? Or basic code.

  • 3 Contributors
  • 2 Replies
  • 119 Views
  • 1 Week Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by rproffitt

Dani AI

Generated

Brief summary tied to the thread: wants to look up a PDF exam result by student number. is right that details of where files live matter, and is correct to push toward pre-processing/indexing PDFs instead of parsing them on every request. Practical options below cover quick wins and a more robust workflow.

A simple, low-effort option when filenames are predictable (for example, "12345.pdf") is a small endpoint that sanitizes the student number, checks the filesystem, and streams the file. This avoids exposing directory listings and prevents directory-traversal attacks. For anything beyond a handful of files, avoid extracting text on demand — parse once at upload or via a cron job and store searchable text or a file-to-student mapping in post meta or a custom table.

Example workflow and tools:

  1. If using WordPress uploads, attach each PDF to a custom post type or store the student number in postmeta.
  2. On upload (or a scheduled job) extract text with a PHP library or CLI tool and save it for searching. Libraries to consider: smalot/pdfparser.
  3. Build a handler that validates the requester (logged-in user or signed token), looks up the mapped file, then streams it using X-Sendfile/X-Accel-Redirect for large files.

Security and performance notes: treat PDFs as PII if they contain student data — enforce authentication/authorization, log accesses, and prefer one-time signed URLs for public links. For large-scale search needs, consider a proper search index (SearchWP, Relevanssi media indexing, or an external engine) rather than full-text queries in MySQL.

Recommended Answers

All 2 Replies

Member Avatar for Josh Connerty

You could create a custom plugin for this. Would need to know more about where the files are hosted and where you retrieve the student number from.

Member Avatar for rproffitt

I worry here that you wrote about a plugin. Also there was a similar question over at Techrepublic where the data source was PDF. This won't be trivial as in "plugin." You'll have to design your solution then research how to read PDFs in PHP code. I suggest you break this down to some backend that reads those PDFs on a schedule and places them into a database so you can use the usual SQL actions.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.