alphabetical navigation list generation?

jpmoriarty

I have an employee list on my intranet that, well, lists all the employees. I'd like to do a navigation strip at the top that would have the alphabet, with each letter hyperlinking to that section of the page (ie A B C d ... where A, C and D are links but B isnt because there's noones name starting with a 😎.

A couple of things - can i do this in a loop where the effect is something like "$letter = A ; $letter++" will get me to B?

Secondly, and more importantly, what's the best way of doing it? Assuming I could get the above bit to work then I think I could query the database each time for surnames that start with that letter, but wouldnt that be a really slow way of doing it?

Is there some option that I havent thought of?

Many thanks in advance for assistance.

Duey

are the employess in a mysql database?

jpmoriarty

it's in MS sql server - well actually that's another problem I'm having. I am trying to get the user list from the active directory of the win 2k server, and populate a table in MSSQL with it (do a script that i can run once a day or something) : if you can help with that bit too then i'd be really grateful, but in essence the employee list is coming from MSSQL.

As i said though i think i'm okay with the script for finding surnames that start with a specific letter - it's more the automating the cycling through of the alphabet that I'm concerned with

adrian_quah

Hey there, here's basically how i did mine..

in the 1st page (display list of alphabest), i have: -

<a href=view_by_alpha.php?alpha=A>A</a>
<a href=view_by_alpha.php?alpha=B>B</a>
<a href=view_by_alpha.php?alpha=C>C</a>
<a href=view_by_alpha.php?alpha=D>D</a>
...
..
.

Then in view_by_alpha.php :-

// Render the Aplhabet so that can query using LIKE _%
$alpha = $alpha . '%'; 

// SQL query
$sql = "SELECT * FROM customer_details WHERE Customer_Name LIKE '$alpha' ORDER BY Customer_Name";

jpmoriarty

Thanks, but i guess it was the increasing alpha bit i was after - you may be interested to know that i've come up with:

<?

$alpha = 65;

while($alpha <= 90)
{

  echo chr($alpha)."<br>";
  $alpha++;
}

?>

to generate the alphabet for you!