[RESOLVED] Handle first record in query differently

Maharg105

Hi Guys,

I'm working on an element of a site which requires that the most recent record retrieved by a query is dealt with differently to all the other records.

Each record is to be placed in a div which will overlap the record before it. In order to do this, every div needs to have a -30px top margin except for the first one.

My first thought was to have one query to get the first record and then another to handle all of the others. Is this the best way forwards, or is it possible to do this in one go?

I hope that made some kind of sense and I'd appreciate any help at all you can give me.

Thanks guys,

laserlight

This sounds more like a styling job than a database job. You could arrange for a little logic in PHP to provide the first div with a special CSS class. In fact, I believe CSS has support for this kind of "do something special to the first element" scenario, but it may only be available in CSS3, which might be a little iffy if you want to provide very broad support for browsers.

Ah sorry, I am wrong: CSS2 :first-child pseudo-class.

halojoy

Yes, you need not 2 query.
If the data fields you fetch are same.

Say you get 10 records ORDER BY newest.

Then you just fetch first result row
and after this while loop to fetch those 9 others

<?php

$result = mysql_query("SELECT ... ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 10");

//fetch the first from result
$first_row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
//do something with it

//fetch the rest 9 rows from result
while( $other_row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ){
    //do something with each other row
}

Maharg105

Thanks for the help guys. Laser light, the information on first-child pseudo-class made for interesting reading and I look forwards to using it in the future. But, as usual, it looks like I will need to wait for the development of IE to catch up before it has wide spread support.

Halojoy, I used your solution and with a bit of tweaking it does exactly what I need.

Thanks for the help guys,