dynamic rowspans

[empnorton]

I am building a calander for a training schedule, and have a situation where a class might have more than one session within a given period.

The table I am building shows the availible classes down the left, and the months of the year across the top. The grid would then be populated with instances each month where the class takes place.

This is simple enough to do when a class only appears once within a month, but what happens if there are more than one? I want to avoid something like the following:

class: jan: feb: mar:
class1: : feb 2: :
class2: jan 7: : mar 3:
class2: jan 8: : :

In this example, I would want to have the january cell for class2 be split into two cells, but the rest of them be a single cell. I would then need to calculate the number of rows per class, and then have the code change to reflect that, but I am not sure how that would work.

Does anyone have an example of this?

If I havent been clear, and example of this in static code can be found at: http://www.firsttech.com/ftweb/trai.../content2.shtml

Thanks in advance

[sarahk]

This isn't hard but it is fiddly.

For starters you will need dummy variables to hold the old and new values of some of the keys. I've recently done something like this to spit out html but not in php.

what I'm giving below is not workable code but knobbled together logic.

while moredata
{
if ($record["key"] = $key)
{
$rowSpan++;
$htmlStr .= "<tr><td>" . $record["displaytext"] . "</td></tr>";
}
else
{
$key = $record["key"];
echo "<td rowspan='$rowSpan'>" . $htmlStr;
$rowSpan = 1;
$htmlStr = $record["month"] . "</td><td>" . $record["displaytext"] . "</td></tr>";
}
}

that way the number of rows to span isn't given until all the data is processed. Rowspan = 1 is fine in html.