How to connect SQL Views to HTML 5 Webpage - sql-server

Question

I have a question I was hoping to get some feedback on being that it is my first time doing something like this.
I am building an intranet site and need to display a SQL view from SQL Server. I've done some research online and I've seen some people say use PHP to connect to the DB, then HTML to build a table... but those scenarios have been for MySQL or Access databases, not SQL Server.
My question is: what is the best way to to go about connecting and displaying a SQL Server view to an HTML 5 page? (I'm mainly just asking for some suggestions on where to start, any good documentation to look at, etc. not looking for someone to code it for me or anything like that)

Answer 1

First of all, you do not want to connect to the database directly from client side code, direct database queries should always be done on the server side.
I'd recommend using PHP because it's fairly simple, lightweight and widely supported.
You can query SQL Server with PHP, although you may need to download and install the PHP PDO drivers from Microsoft in order to do this. (Google 'sql server php pdo driver' and you'll be able to find them for your particular platform)
Alternatively you may be able to use an ODBC driver instead, although I haven't tried that personally.
In PHP you can use PDO to open a connection to your database, select from the view into an associative array using something like the following:
$pdo_object = new PDO($dsn, $user, $password);
$statement = $pdo_object->prepare("SELECT column1, column2 FROM view1");
$statement->execute();
$data = $statement->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
From here you can iterate over this data to render a table or pass it into javascript and have that populate a data grid.