Displaying Results, Hiding Empty Fields

imbizsol

I did a search form at http://www.madisonheightschamber.org/m2m.php. Is there a way to hide fields in a record that are empty?

For instance:

If you click on Additional Discounts in the first drop down box, then hit submit, you are shown a page of company records in this category. However, you'll notice a blank line between the company name and the address. In my database, this blank line goes to a field called contact, but these particular companies don't have any particular contact people so their contact fields have been left blank.

Is there a way to hide the empty fields in my results page so that there are no blank lines showing?

If you click on Search Alphabetically in the lower drop down box, you'll see how each company record looks.

The fields I have for this database are:

ID
category
company
contact
address
city
phone
description

Some of the records have empty contact fields; some have empty addresses or cities, but (if it's possible) I don't want the empty lines to show on the results page because as you'll see if you view the alpha listing, it looks awful to have blank lines there.

Hope this makes sense?

Thanks in advance.

bastien

//in the area after the database query and before the echo to the
//page

if is_null($contact){
echo "<tr><td colspan=2 height=20></td></tr>";
}else{
echo "<tr><td> Contact: </td><td>$contact</td></tr>";
}

you can do this for each element where there might be a null value stored in the DB...

hth

imbizsol

Okay, I got it to work in my first search script, but I'm not quite sure how to put it into my alphabetical search script. If I change anything, something else will stop working. Here's my script for the alphabetical search limiting records on a page:

<?php
// Connect to the database
$db = mysql_connect("localhost","xxxxx","xxxxxx");
mysql_select_db (members);
// Show 5 rows of data, starting from whatever position $start is equal to
if (!isset($start)) $start = 0;
$query = "SELECT * FROM m2m ORDER BY company LIMIT " . $start . ", 5";

$result = mysql_query($query);
// Now we print out the results, starting by making a table
echo ("<table border = '0' width = '80%' align='center'>");
echo "MHHP Member Discounts\n";

while ($rows = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
printf("<tr>%s %s %s %s %s %s %s</tr>\n", $rows[2], $rows[3], $rows[4], $rows[5], $rows[6], $rows[7], $rows[8]);
}
// do another query to get the number of rows in our table
$query = "SELECT count(*) as count FROM m2m";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$numrows = $row['count'];
if($start > 0)
echo "<a href=\"" . $PHP_SELF . "?start=" . ($start - 5) .
"\">Previous</a>                                   ";
if($numrows > ($start + 5))
echo "<a href=\"" . $PHP_SELF . "?start=" . ($start + 5) .
"\">Next</a> \n";
// Finally we close off the table
echo "</table>";
?>

I did this script different than the other search one because for some reason I couldn't do the limit records and put in next/previous links in the other script.

bastien

couple of questions though:

why not use mysql_fetch_array in the first query? you wouldn't have to do another query to get the total rows....as in

$numRows = mysql_num_rows($result);
while ($rows = mysql_fetch_array($result){

why not give each $row element its own variable? makes it much easier to see which elemnts may need manipulation....like in this case...

while ($rows = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
$name=$rows[0];
$contact=$rows[1];
$phone=$rows[2];
//etc
//then

printf("<tr>$name\n");
if is_null($contact){
printf("No Contact Available\n");
}else{
printf("$contact\n");
}
printf("$phone"\n");

it is a little more coding but I prefer it as it makes things more clear as to what I am showing the user and simple for me to change if there is no data or the data is numeric and need calcs done etc.

hth