I’ve been a bit quiet lately as far as blog posts go. The main reason for this is that I am trying to get the current theory test database on to my server, and so I am playing around with a lot of programming for various reasons (which keep changing).
I’d initially started typing in the questions and answers from the question bank – reasoning that if I did a handful of questions each day then it would only take a few weeks to get them all in. But then I had trouble getting a suitable GUI for the MySQL database – one which didn’t involve a lot of clicking and which would allow me to repetitively enter question and answer text. So I wrote my own.
I’d had a close look at the Driving Test Success DVD and couldn’t find the questions database or any readable files. But then, one of my pupils who has a Mac had had problems running the DSA disk, so she gave it to me and I got her a Mac-compatible one.
The DSA disk has all the questions as XML files.
So, at the moment I am writing a PHP utility to extract the data and convert it to a suitable file format that I’ll be able to import to a MySQL database.