Gatepass Management System

PHP/MySQL web application that streamlines the process of registering, tracking, and reporting on visitors and vehicles entering a guarded facility (campus, office, hostel, etc.). The UI is built on a Bootstrap 4 admin theme and ships with ready-made screens for day-to-day gate operations.

---

Key Features

• Dashboard metrics for total, today, and yesterday visitor and vehicle counts plus quick links into detail views.
• Visitor registry with add/edit forms, photo upload, enter/exit timestamps, remarks, search, filters for "inside" versus "exited today", and soft validation for missing date columns.
• Vehicle register with similar CRUD, enter/exit tracking, inline AJAX updates (vehicle-update.php), and per-row activity logging (storage/logs/vehicle-update.log).
• Department and designation masters for maintaining lookup values used throughout visitor records.
• Reports between dates (bwdates-reports.php) to audit visits over a chosen window.
• QR scanning workflow (scan_page.php) powered by html5-qrcode to fetch visitor details on scan, with hits optionally logged to scan_log.
• Account administration: login, forgot/reset password, change password, and profile update for the admin user (tbladmin).

---

Technology Stack

• PHP 7.4+ with the mysqli extension
• MySQL or MariaDB (configure your own database name during setup)
• Apache or any PHP-capable web server (XAMPP/LAMP/WAMP recommended for local development)
• Bootstrap 4.1, Font Awesome, jQuery, and other UI assets vendored under vendor/
• Optional online dependency: html5-qrcode (loaded from CDN in scan_page.php)

---

Project Layout

• css/ - Theme stylesheets bundled with the admin template
• images/ - Backgrounds and illustrative assets
• includes/ - Shared PHP includes (dbconnection.php, header.php, sidebar.php, fetch_data.php)
• js/ - Template JavaScript for Bootstrap, charts, helpers
• storage/logs/ - Runtime logs (for example vehicle-update.log)
• uploads/ - Visitor photo uploads (ensure write permission)
• vendor/ - Front-end libraries (Bootstrap, FontAwesome, etc.)
• *.php - Page controllers (dashboard, forms, reports, API endpoints)
• README.md

---

Prerequisites

1. PHP 7.4 or newer (tested up to PHP 8.2) with mysqli enabled.
2. MySQL 5.7 / 8.0 or MariaDB equivalent.
3. Composer is not required; dependencies are already vendored.
4. Writable uploads/ and storage/logs/ directories for file storage and logging.
5. Internet access if you plan to use the QR code scanning page (loads html5-qrcode from a CDN).

---

Installation and Setup

1. Clone or copy the project into your web server's document root (for example c:\xampp\htdocs\gatepass-main).
2. Create the database (choose any name you prefer; gatepass_db is used here as an example):

   CREATE DATABASE gatepass_db CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

3. Import schema/data:
   • If you already have an export, import it into your chosen database.
   • Otherwise, create the tables listed in the Database Overview section manually (the column names are inferred from the codebase).
4. Configure database credentials by editing includes/dbconnection.php:

   $con = mysqli_connect("localhost", "root", "", "your_database_name");

   Adjust the host, username, password, and database name to match your environment.
5. Ensure writable directories:

   chmod -R 775 uploads storage/logs   # Linux or macOS example

   On Windows, confirm the IIS/Apache user has modify rights.
6. Start your web server (for example Apache via XAMPP Control Panel) and navigate to http://localhost/gatepass-main/.
7. Create an admin account if the database is empty (see below).

---

Database Overview

Table	Purpose	Key Columns Used In Code
tbladmin	Stores the admin account that can log in.	ID, AdminName, UserName, Password (MD5 hash), MobileNumber, Email
tblvisitor	Master table for visitor profiles and visit logs.	ID, FullName, rollno, Deptartment, des, MobileNumber, Email, Address, CNIC, photo, EnterDate, ExitDate, remark
vehicles	Registered vehicles linked to visitors or employees.	id, fullname, vnumber, EnterDate, ExitDate
departments	Department catalog used in visitor forms.	id, dep
designations	Designation/role catalog used in visitor forms.	id, designation
scan_log	Optional audit trail for QR scans.	id, rollno, created_at (add a timestamp column for better tracing)

Note: The application defensively adds EnterDate and ExitDate columns at runtime if they are missing to avoid fatal errors. It is still best to define them up-front in your schema.

---

Seed an Admin Account

Insert at least one administrator so you can sign in:

INSERT INTO tbladmin (AdminName, UserName, MobileNumber, Email, Password)
VALUES ('Site Admin', 'admin', '03001234567', 'admin@example.com', MD5('ChangeMe123!'));

You can later change the password from within the UI (change-password.php).

---

Daily Workflow

• Visitor intake

  • Use visitors-form.php, studententry.php, teacherentry.php, or class4entry.php to create new profiles.
  • save_visitor.php handles photo uploads into uploads/ and stores the relative path in tblvisitor.photo.
  • visitor-enter.php and visitor-exit.php stamp entry or exit times; visitor-update.php lets you amend dates manually.

• Vehicle tracking

  • Add vehicles via addvehicle.php, manage them in managevehicle.php.
  • Inline edit uses AJAX (vehicle-update.php) and logs every request to storage/logs/vehicle-update.log.
  • Entry/exit buttons call vehicle-enter.php and vehicle-exit.php.

• Reports and auditing

  • bwdates-reports.php -> bwdates-reports-details.php provides between-dates filtering on tblvisitor.EnterDate.
  • manage-newvisitors.php and managevehicle.php include status filters (All, Currently Inside, Exited Today) plus message banners driven by the msg query parameter.

• QR scanning

  • Visit scan_page.php, allow camera access, and scan a code containing tblvisitor.ID.
  • includes/fetch_data.php returns JSON used to populate the result panel.
  • Make sure scan_log exists if you want to retain scan history (the script attempts to insert into it).

---

Logging and File Storage

• Uploads: Images land in uploads/. The application will create the folder on demand, but pre-creating it with appropriate permissions is safer.
• Logs: Runtime diagnostics append to storage/logs/vehicle-update.log. You can add more log files as needed; keep the directory writable.

---

Development Notes

• Error reporting is suppressed across most pages (error_reporting(0);). Enable it temporarily while debugging:

  error_reporting(E_ALL);
  ini_set('display_errors', 1);

• SQL queries are currently composed manually. For production hardening consider parameterised queries (prepared statements) and stronger password hashing (for example password_hash()).
• Front-end libraries live under vendor/. Replace or upgrade them by dropping in newer versions as required; no build pipeline is involved.
• scan_page.php includes the QR library from a CDN. Bundle it locally if offline access is required.

---

Troubleshooting

• Blank pages or redirects back to login: Confirm $_SESSION['cvmsaid'] is being set after login. Sessions require session.save_path to be writable.
• "Connection Fail" errors: Verify credentials in includes/dbconnection.php and ensure MySQL is running.
• Image upload failures: Check uploads/ permissions and PHP's upload_max_filesize / post_max_size.
• QR scanner not loading: Ensure the device has a camera and the page is served over HTTP or HTTPS with camera permissions granted.
• Missing columns: The code attempts to auto-add EnterDate and ExitDate, but other columns (for example rollno, photo) must exist. Revisit the Database Overview table if you see SQL errors.

---

Next Steps

• Add a database/ folder with a SQL dump for easy bootstrapping.
• Replace MD5 password storage with PHP's password_hash() / password_verify().
• Implement role-based access control if guards or clerks require separate logins.
• Expand reporting (CSV export, vehicle statistics, etc.) as needed.

---

License

No explicit license is provided. Treat this project as "all rights reserved" until the authors specify otherwise.