Is there a better way?

[mstringham]

I have a page that displays the months of the year - January, February ..... December.

I need to query my events table and get all cooresponding events and display them under the correct month.

For example -

Select event_title, id from $table_name WHERE month=1
would produce all events that would fit under January.

My question - is it smarter to query the db once and get all events and then place them in an array and display them ? and if I do this, how can I seperate them under the appropriate month?

My first thought was to create 12 separate queries - one for each month and display them that way.

Any suggestion is appreciated.

thanks
Mark

[sarahk]

I would have thought that one query would be best but you might need to test it on your system.

change your query to:

Select event_title, id from $table_name order by month

then loop through the results and store the month in a variable eg $prevMth at the end of each loop

then at the beginning of the loop you can see if the month matches $prevMth, if it's the same add the content, if it's different then end the row, start a new one, write the heading, start to write the content etc.

This assumes the following layout
Jan: blah blah
Feb: blah blah

Just look at your data, how you are doing it and think laterally. Shouldn't be too hard.

good luck

[Weedpacket]

What sarahk said, but if you have other ordering criteria another approach may be to not sort by month. Instead:

Set up an $array with twelve elements, one for each month, indexed 1-12 (the same values used in the month field).

Get the data from the database in one request, loop through the records, find out which $month each record applies to, and store it in the $array[$month] array.

So that January's records will be in $array[1], February's in $array[2], etc.

Basically, I prefer getting the data out of the database first, massaging it into an appropriate form, and then trying to display it.