Alternating content

FijiSmithy

I want to build a page that displays one of two alternating strings.
The first request for this page will return SERVER1 and the second will return SERVER2 then the following requests will return SERVER1, SERVER2, SERVER1, SERVER2.... and so on.....

I can create a procedure in a database I supose or use files but I want to see if there is anyone out there with a more solid solution.

bretticus

What is the purpose of displaying SERVER1 and SERVER2?

FijiSmithy

bretticus;10898879 wrote:
What is the purpose of displaying SERVER1 and SERVER2?

I've automated a client installation that needs to communicate with one of the two servers. This client will call this page and read one of the two names. This also allows the administrators to add to or change the server names....

So perhaps I should change my request from alternating between to names to scrolling through a rolling queue of server names... but each time you access the page you get the next server name in the sequence.....

bretticus

Okay, I think I understand more.

The simplest way to go about this would be to store the servers as individual records in a database table. Make a timestamps column in the table and ORDER BY it. Each time you return the query, call an UPDATE on the top record and set the timestamp column to NOW() which will ensure it shows up on the bottom of the list the next time the page is called.

If you want to take out the database, you could serialize an array and write it to a file. Each time you read the array out, just do a simple array rotate and writer it back. If you want to do this with much greater performance, you could store the array with app caching such as APC or memcache.