Posted by Andy Hassall on 10/02/06 23:20

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:07:47 GMT, "mantrid" <ian.dandav@virgin.net> wrote:

>I have records from a database that are extracted with php and displayed in
>a table.
>Data in some of the fields is replicated
>
>eg
>something1,item1,somethingelse1
>something1,item1,somethingelse2
>something1,item2,somethingelse3
>something1,item2,somethingelse4
>something2,item1,somethingelse5
>something2,item1,somethingelse6
>something2,item2,somethingelse7
>something2,item2,somethingelse8
>
>i wish to tidy this up and make it more readable by putting repeated fields
>as a header row or something along those lines
>eg
>
>something1
> item1
> somethingelse1
> somethingelse2
> item2
> somethingelse3
> somethingelse4
>
>something2
> item1
> somethingelse5
> somethingelse6
> item2
> somethingelse7
> somethingelse8
>
>I think I can do it using about 3 sql statements two of which use grouping,
>but I would like to know if there is a more elegant solution using the one
>sql and somehow doing the grouping in the php.

For each field that you're grouping by in your display, keep a variable for
the last seen value. When it changes, print a header row, and reset the
variable. So for example here, you'd have two variables keeping track of the
"somethingX" and "itemX" fields.

When you see a change in the first-level heading also reset the second-level
variable (to empty string or something that won't appear in the data itself),
so you get a heading row for "something2/item1".

Your SQL and data remains unchanged, it's just a matter of how you display it.

--
Andy Hassall :: andy@andyh.co.uk :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space :: disk and FTP usage analysis tool

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