[RESOLVED] Formatting a report

retro

Hi!

I am fairly new to PHP, having thrown myself in at the deep end by agreeing to help a friend with his site! I am learning as I go, but keep meeting obstacles. I have one that I can't solve. I have asked this on another forum, but I thought I'd come and ask here as I would ideally like to get this done today. Oh, and apologies if I use any incorrect terms!

The site has a 'report' to display the results of a query (the basic premise is to list orders to be delivered on a set day of the week). This is working fine, but I can only get it to display in columns, e.g.:

Joe Bloggs 1 0 2
Fred Smith 0 1 0

The above numbers are items, so Joe Bloggs wants 1 of Item1, 0 of Item2 and 2 of Item3.

What I would like is to display the results like a delivery sheet, so each person displays in a separate table, with each item on a new line, e.g.:

Name: Joe Bloggs
Item 1: 1
Item 2: 0
Item 3: 2

Name: Fred Smith
Item1: 0
Item2: 1
Item3: 0

I know that I can rearrange the way the table displays in the HTML, but I don't know how to sort the looping side of things!

Here is my current code:

// print table header
echo("<table cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\" width=\"500\" class=\"edittable\">
<tr><th>Name</th><th>Item 1</th><th>Item 2</th><th>Item 3</th></tr>");

// fetch the current row into the array $row
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC))
  {
  echo("<tr>");
  echo("<td>" . $row["FirstName"] . " " . $row["Lastname"] . "</td>");
  echo("<td>" . $row["Item1"] . "</td>");
  echo("<td>" . $row["Item2"] . "</td>");
  echo("<td>" . $row["Item3"] . "</td>");
  echo "</tr>";
  }

echo("</table>");

How can I achieve the layout I want?

I would be happy if someone could get me that far. However, I'm wanting to go a step further, so if it makes a difference to how I should approach this, here's what I want to do...

Each table should filter out the unwanted items. So, taking the above example, it would display as:

Name: Joe Bloggs
Item 1: 1
Item 3: 2

Name: Fred Smith
Item2: 1

Can anyone suggest how I could go about this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

leatherback

You first question: You just do the thing you would do in HTML in he php template:

  {
  echo "<tr><td>" . $row["FirstName"] . " " . $row["Lastname"] . "</td></tr>";
  echo "<tr><td>" . $row["Item1"] . "</td></tr>";
  echo "<tr><td>" . $row["Item2"] . "</td></tr>";
  echo "<tr><td>" . $row["Item3"] . "</td></tr>";
  }

Oh.. not sure what you are building, site-wise. I would look into using unordered lists and CSS for laying out these lists of items.

Second question: It is impossible to tell you how to do this, as we cannot tell based on which criteria you want to include or exclude items from a list

retro

Thanks very much! I stuck the <table> tags inside the while statement, and that worked a treat!

Apologies, I forgot to mention the criteria for the second question! I only wanted the items displayed if their value wasn't 0. Again, I have worked out how to do this with a for loop and if statement. Here is my modified code:

if($total>0) {

  $i = "Item";
// fetch the current row into the array $row
  while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC))
    {
// print table header
    echo("<table cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\" width=\"500\" class=\"edittable\">");
    echo("<tr><td>" . $row["FirstName"] . " " . $row["Lastname"] . "</td></tr>");
    for($j=1; $j<=10; $j++) 
      {
      if ($row[$i.$j]>0)
        {
        echo("<tr><td>" . $row[$i.$j] . "</td></tr>");
        }
      }
    echo("<tr><td>" . $row["date"] . "</td></tr>");
    echo("</table>");

}
  }

This seems to work OK. Let me know if there is something I am doing wrong, or could do better!

Thanks again for your help.

leatherback

Should work as expected.
The downside of sticking the table tags inside the loop is that you generate a new table for each person, and colums may not remain stable. But then again that is easily fixed with formatting rules.

Still.. I think I would go with lists and css 😃

retro

Sorry, I don't really get what you mean about lists and css.

The code is just a snippet of the full page. The page has includes for a header, footer, javascript and css stylesheet. It is supposed to look like the rest of the site.

What do you mean by lists?

I'll tell you a little about the site.

It is for a small company with a small range of products, who have a van to deliver their products.

The orders will mainly be recurring weekly.
It is for internal (staff) use only
It is basically their order tracking system.

The member of staff inputs the customer's details (if a new customer). They then input the quantities required of each item. After confirming the 'basket', this saves to the database. So far, basically a simple shopping cart for internal use only.

The van has different routes every day. The member of staff will have assigned a route to the order. There will be a variety of reports that can be viewed and printed, for example view deliveries for a particular date, or the whole week, or the whole month.

If you want to take a look at the site so far, I could PM you the link. If you think I could be using a better method, I'm all ears 🙂

Incidentally, what is the best way to have a plain page for printing, as often seen on sites with a "Printable Version" button?

leatherback

interesting that you mention the 'plain page for printing'. This is a really odd feature which i see on a lot of pages. I personally style my websites using CSS (Cascading Stylesheets, google it). They basically tell the browser what look and feel you want for individual components of your site.

As such, you can create a list:
<ul>
<li class="head">The Name</li>
<li class="value">a value</li>
</ul>

and style the whole thing using css. The massive benefit s that you can create one stylesheet, attach it to every page in your site, and have instant consitency, updatability & reduce bandwidth usage (The css file gets cached).

A second good feature is the ability to define for which edia the CSS is. So you can create one for mobile devices, one for webviewing, and one for printing. Allowing you to show or remove elements forf specific media (e.g., have a non-printing menu on your page, and remove banners for printing).

It is however a bit of a shift in setting up sites, and I would suggest you do read up on it a bit before you swap into it. To get some idea of what I am talking about, go ahaed and visit a site i am finetuning, http://www.cookseasonal.com/recipe/46
look at the page, the source and a print preview. Note the difference in print-preview and the page on the site.

retro

Yeah, I'm already using CSS to format my page. Every page on this site starts:

<?php $windowtitle="Contacts Database";$dbtitle="Contacts Database";$pagetitle="All contacts"; include "header.php" ?>

header.php includes a link to the CSS sheet. The strings are used to put information in certain places on the page. There is also a footer.php at the end of each page.

I'll show you the page. The CSS formatting of tables is a bit messed up, but I'm getting the site to work before tarting it up 🆒

I didn't realise that you could change how the print would look automatically. I like that! In fact, on my site it is removing the header and footer, so I'll play with removing the other unwanted sections, too.

Thanks again for the help!

EDIT OK, I can't PM you, so here's a pic. It is just to show the CSS formatting, as it is a different part of the site.

http://img174.imageshack.us/my.php?image=examplelayouteb1.jpg