[RESOLVED] Dynamic Drop Down Menu

BeanieMan

Hi, i need to create a dynamic drop down menu..

i want to select from the DB all the species that are for sale.
I then want to display each species name in the drop down menu once.

PHP FILE

$query = $this->db->execute('SELECT `species` FROM `table1`');

$species = Array();
        if ($this->db->numRows($query) > 0)
        {
            while($l = $this->db->fetch($query))
            {
                $species[] = $l;
            }
        }

$this->tpl->assign('species', $species);
$this->tpl->display('Market.tpl');

SMARTY TEMPLATE

{if $species}
<select name="Species">
{foreach from=$species item=species}
<option value="{$species}">{$species}</option>
{/foreach}
</select>
{/if}

Derokorian

Question: What is the problem? Syntactically I see nothing wrong with this code, so if its not working or its giving an error you need to tell us:

What are the errors?
What do you expect to get?
What do you actually get instead?

BeanieMan

hi, thanks for your reply..

The problem i am having is that, the table holds many records with the same species name, so it is being added to the array multiple times and being displayed in the menu multiple times.

Thanks

bradgrafelman

Sounds like the problem might be in the actual design of the database rather than the code used to get data from it.

What is the structure/schema of the table you're getting this data from, and why are there "many records with the same species name" ?

Derokorian

Also array_unique()

$query = $this->db->execute('SELECT `species` FROM `table1`'); 

$species = Array(); 
        if ($this->db->numRows($query) > 0) 
        { 
            while($l = $this->db->fetch($query)) 
            { 
                $species[] = $l; 
            }
            $species = array_unique($species);
        } 

$this->tpl->assign('species', $species); 
$this->tpl->display('Market.tpl');

bradgrafelman

Well yeah, there are several workarounds you could use to avoid fixing the issue (some including modifying the SQL query to eliminate the duplicates), but they're still just workarounds.

You could download the entire Wikipedia database and then delete all but the one page you'd like to see, but it'd still be more efficient to instead work out the issues that are preventing you from just retrieving the data you want.