$_SESSION & multidimensional arrays

danielle

Ok, I know this is really simple and I'm just, again, stuck on something dumb.

The basic gist is that I have 3 tables in the database - galleries, photos, gallery_content.

table "galleries" - has gallery_id, gallery (gallery name), directory (where image is stored) and display (orientation - horz=horizontal / vert=vertical)

"photos" has the image info - name, thubnail name, caption etc...
"gallery_content" - tells what images are in each gallery

totally simple, the application is actually done and working fine minus some alignment and tweaking.

the thing is -- i want to store a simple array of gallery info - just gallery_id and name so i can pass gallery_id as $g on the url but stil easily access the name of the gallery.

in a previous application, i did something like this:

if (! isset($stateData) ) session_register ("stateData");

//LOOP THROUGH DB RESULTS:
$q="select * from states";
$r=mysql_query($q);
while ($a=mysql_fetch_array){	
	$stateData[$a['state_abbr']]['name']=$a['state_name'];
	$stateData[$a['state_abbr']]['population']=$a['population'];
}

I could then get the info by saying something like:
$abbrIn="MN";
echo "$stateData[$abbrIn]['population']";

to print the population...

That works fine BUT I'm trying to be a good girl and use $_SESSION instead...

I think this should be rather simple but I'm unable to either load or access the information.

I first tried something like this:

$q_galleries="select * from galleries";
$r_galleries=mysql_query($q_galleries); 
while ($a_galleries=mysql_fetch_array($r_galleries))	{
	$g=$a_galleries['gallery_id'];
	$g_name=$a_galleries['gallery'];
	$g_display=$a_galleries['display'];
	$_SESSION['gallery_data'][$g]['g']=$g;
	$_SESSION['gallery_data'][$g]['name']=$g_name;
	$_SESSION['gallery_data'][$g]['display']=$g_display;
}//end while

but print_r($_SESSION) gave me wacky results like...
Array ( [gallery_data] => Array ( [g] => h3 [1] => h [18] => h8 [16] => h6 [20] => h0 [19] => h9 [21] => h1 [23] => h3 ) [] => horz [$gallery_data] => Array ( [g] => ) )

I have this feeling that it's getting in ok, I'm just having problems getting it out.

This seems to work...

while ($a_galleries=mysql_fetch_array($r_galleries))	{
	$g=$a_galleries['gallery_id'];
	$g_name=$a_galleries['gallery'];
	$g_display=$a_galleries['display'];

$_SESSION['gallery_data'][$g]=$g;
$_SESSION[$g]['name']=$g_name;
$_SESSION[$g]['display']=$g_display;

}//end while

The print_r gets all the data out but I would rather have it in 1 array with the key being the gallery id.

Not to mention, I'm unable to get the data out in any other form. I've tried several different loops.

I should be able to just count the number of elements in the $gallery_data array, loop through it and grab the info using something like this: $gallery_data[$g]['name'] With the above I would need to have a loop w/in the loop.

Any help, examples, input would be greatly appreciated! My head hurts. :bemused:

danielle

finally! :rolleyes: I figured it out.

I'm posting what I did - hopefully it will helps someone avoid the hours of searching. Seems most info is either about very basic session or basic multi-dimensional arrays. More advanced info seems to be so specific to the application that it was hard to pick out the simple answers.

This, of course, can be done w/ any sort of user or product data etc. Obviously I'm using it for a photo uploader.

run this function using -- getGalleries (); -- at beginning of session and whenever there are changes to the Galleries table:

function getGalleries ()	{
	//SET UP GALLERY ARRAY -to be done once at login and whenever a gallery is added/edited/removed
	$q_galleries="select * from galleries";
	$r_galleries=mysql_query($q_galleries); 
	$i=0;
	while ($a_galleries=mysql_fetch_array($r_galleries))	{
		$_SESSION['galleryData'][$i]= array('g' => $a_galleries['gallery_id'],
                 						'name' => $a_galleries['gallery'],
				                 		'display'   => $a_galleries['display']);
		$i++;
	}//end while
}//end function getGalleries

To view/access the gallery data from anywhere in the application (be sure to have session_start() first in php file) you can get it with something like this:

$arr=$_SESSION['galleryData'];
$gcnt=count($arr);
echo "<table border='1'>";
echo "<tr><td><strong>ID</strong></td><td><strong>Gallery Name</strong></td><td><strong>Display</strong></td></tr>";
for($i = 0; $i < $gcnt; $i++){
	echo "<tr><td align='left'>".$arr[$i]['g']."</td><td align='left'>".$arr[$i]['name']."</td><td align='left'>".$arr[$i]['display']."</td></tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
?>

I can't figure out how to show the table w/html but the results in the browser look something like this:

If anyone has input on doing this better/smarter, let me know...

🙂