Dynamic Drop Down Help....

neuro4848

I'm in need of some coding help..

I have a PHP page that has a bunch of drop down boxes that ask for a start date and hour, an end date and hour and a hostname.

Well, everything thus far has been OK because I didn't really have to use any dynamic content, until now. I would like to populate the HOSTNAME drop down box to read from MySQL database. The problem is that the data is stored as such:

2005-05-25 02:02:33 / 35.3918 / patrolreport / NT_CPU / CPU_1 / CPUprcrUserTimePercent
2005-05-25 02:02:33 / 517.033 / patrolreport / NT_CPU / CPUTotal / CPUprcrInterruptsPerSec
2005-05-25 02:02:33 / 4.16342 / patrolreport / NT_CPU / CPUTotal / CPUprcrPrivTimePercent
2005-05-25 02:02:33 / 27.1206 / patrolreport / NT_CPU / CPUTotal / CPUprcrProcessorTimePercent
2005-05-25 02:02:33 / 22.9572 / patrolreport / NT_CPU / CPUTotal / CPUprcrUserTimePercent

"patrolreport" is the actual hostname, and the data in the database refers to it on every single row. Now, I'm assuming that if I do go through with it, I'll have a HUGE drop down of multiple hostname entries with the same name. Is there anyway I can just have it display once?

thanks,
los

Trs2988

It seems like you would need something like this:


$hosts = array();

$result = mysql_query("select hostname from table");
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {

//do some processing so that $hostname just contains what you want, such as patrolreport

if(in_array($hostname,$hosts)) {
echo "<option value='$hostname'>$hostname</option>";
$hosts[] = $hostname;
}

}

For every hostname, it firsts checks to see if the hostname is in an array. If it is NOT, it prints it out and adds it to the array. Then, every time it encounters that hostname, it WILL be in the array and it will skip it.

Hope that helps.

konsu

alternatively, you can use "select unique" sql statement.

Trs2988

Originally posted by konsu
alternatively, you can use "select unique" sql statement.

Actually, that wouldn't work. As he says, the data is stored in those long strings. The strings are (for the most part) all different. He just needs the unique hostnames.

konsu

agree if so. i thought that he just gave an example of a table's contents where all fields were separated by spaces.

... unless of course he uses regular expressions or substring extraction in the query

Trs2988

Originally posted by konsu
... unless of course he uses regular expressions or substring extraction in the query

Over my head 😃

konsu

well, something like

select substr(field, 2, 3) from table

neuro4848

Wow, thanks for the reply you guys! I knew I was asking in the right place. Now, I have a concern.... I just realized that the data for 1 server are in the thousands of rows and I'm going to have about 20 to start. I would imagine that would make it really slow applying that logic to every single line.

Perhaps there's a way I can apply that logic and post the results to ANOTHER table at a given interval (say midnight as a scheduled job)?

I was just wondering because browsing through the data, each server literally contains a thousand entries stored for 7 days, so if my math is correct, that's like a gazillion entries.

Any thoughts?