results display order and duplicates in dropdown menu

dotty

Hi,

I am trying to resolve two issues.

The first one is:

I have a php/mySql news section on a website and want include a system to allow the website administrator to change the order of news items. They currently display as ID descending where ID is auto-incremented in MySql. Is there a standard or best way to do this?

The other problem is:

There is a dropdown menu which is populated from a table that gets its data from an input box on a form - so if a word is inputted more than once, it appears that many times in the dropdown menu. Is there some way the list can be set to read the same word once only?

Thanks a lot

🙂 🙂

Shrike

What criteria do you want to order the list by?

You can use [MAN]array_unique[/MAN] to remove duplicate values from an array. There are some caveats for using it on keyed arrays, I think.

paulnaj

Hi dotty,

The second question's easier ... use DISTINCT in the SELECT sql ...

SELECT DISTINCT word FROM tableORDER BY word ASC

... will give you a sorted list with no duplicates.

There's any number of ways of achieving the first problem. In the end it just means storing the order somewhere ... a file or, more likely, as a 'position' field in the news table itself.

The best way to decide would be to first think about how the administrator is going to make the change. What's the 'interface' going to be? That's going to be a HTML form which sends the 'order' information to a php page which makes the necessary updates to the database (or file).

Paul.

dotty

Hi Shrike!

A relative of Shrek I take it??

I want my client to be able to change the order of news items. I have them set to display by time descending so the last one shows on top - but they want to be able to change the order if older messages become relevant again, etc.

I was thinking that if I use the ID field and set it to 'order by 'id'' then I could give them an interface where they can swap around the ID's to display in a particular order. Is this the normal way to do this? If so, do you know if it will work with auto-increment? Or will MySQL force them back into order again?

On the other issue, I've decided to add a new table for the dropdown menu population and index it to create a relationship with the main table - I think this will work better.

dotty

Oh thanks Paul

You posted the same time as me !

maybe I won't have to make that new table afterall!!😃

dotty

GROUP BY

solved the menu issue! Still working on the order problem :rolleyes: