Iterating through rows

PHP
1

Hi,

I am trying to display a forum by the category the forum it exists. So what i need to do is display the forum category and display all the forums within that category and so on…

This is the page i am working on:

http://www.freemanholland.com/kidsintranet/public_html/coffee-break

I have the following code:


<div id="forum-layout">
                <table class='tabulardata' cellspacing='0' rules='all'>
                    <tr>
                        <th align="left">Forum</th>
                        <th>Threads</th>
                        <th class="stat-width">Posts</th>
                        <th>Recently Posted</th>
                    </tr>
                <?
                    $prevRow = null;
                    $i = 1;
                    while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($forums)) {
                       if ($prevRow !== null) {
                            if($row->name != $saveForumCategory) {
                                echo "<tr><td colspan='4' class='tdborder'><strong>$row->name</strong></td></tr>";
                                $cycle = false;
                                $saveForumCategory = $row->name;
                            }
                       } else {
                                echo "<tr><td colspan='4' class='tdborder'><strong>$row->name</strong></td></tr>";
                                $cycle = false;
                                $saveForumCategory = $row->name;
                       }
                ?>
                    <tr>
                        <td class="td-forumname"><a href='<?=__SITE_PATH?>coffee-break/topics'><?=$row->theName?></a><br/><?=$row->body?></td>
                        <td class='tdstats'>1</td>
                        <td class='tdstats'>1</td>
                        <td align="center">21 Apr 2010 01:11:58 PM</td>
                    </tr>
                    <?
                         $prevRow = $row;
                         $i++;
                         $i = $i % 2;
                    }
                ?>
                </table>
            </div>
        </div>

I nearly have it working but as you can see the “Forum rules” category is displayed twice because there are 2 forums within it. So i need to have the forum category showing only once… Any ideas where i am going wrong?

This is the method i am using:


    public function selectAllForums(){

        $sql = "SELECT *, i.ID as theID, i.name as theName FROM forums i
                INNER JOIN forum_category c ON c.ID = i.catID WHERE i.deleted = 0
                ORDER BY i.date_added ASC";
        $result = mysql_query($sql);
        return $result;
    }

Can someone please help me out?

Thanks

2

I think you might make your life a bit easier by processing your query results before they get passed to your template. Notice that you duplicate code in your template processor and that you have a bunch of previous record stuff. All of that is needed because you are basically converting a flat record to a tree structure.

Consider adding a bit of code to yourSelectAllForums function. The function should return an array that looks something like:


$data = array(
  'cat1' => array('forum1','forum2','forum3'),
  'cat2' => array('forum8','forum9')
);

Now your template processor loops once over $data to get the category names then does a nested loop to process each forum. The code will be much cleaner and easier to style.

3

I like it this way. But since you’re using a table, to get empty space between two rows you’d have to add an extra row, and style it as to not show any borders.

4

Thanks Guido :wink:

I am trying to split up the first and second forum, so basically the “Games and activities” forum i want there to be a gap at the top to split the forums up in a sense.

I have tried putting in line breaks and styling but it doesn’t working, can you point me in the right direction if possible?

Thanks

5

Add the category id (or name, whatever you want the categories to be ordered by) to the ORDER BY, so it first orders by category, and then by date.