Selecting A Record To Display

wilhud

Hey all,

Basically, what I want to do is have a record displayed on the front page of my website. However, I want to be able to select which record is going to be displayed. Maybe with radio buttons or something like that. Not sure.

I haven't been able to find anything like this online, but I'm sure it's somehwere. Would I need to update an entire column in my table? Is that even possible? Or maybe there's a simple way of doing this.

I'm a newbie to PHP/MySQL, but learn quickly. I just need pointed in the right direction. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks! Wil

tomhath

"Hope this makes sense."

Sorry, doesn't make any sense to me. And you talk like you're from Pittsburgh. There are some pretty good tutorials around on php and mysql, maybe hit a search engine and read a few to see what's out there.

wilhud

Sorry, maybe this'll make more sense...

I've got a bunch of records that contain news articles. They're displayed as a list on a news page. What i want to do is have one of these articles displayed on the front page of the site. That's easy enough. The tricky part is, I want to be able to select which article is to be displayed. It's going to change often. So this would have to be done through some sort of form with checkboxes or radio buttons, I'm guessing. That's where I'm stumped. I have some ideas, but I'm not sure they're even possible.

BTW, I'm from SoCal...maybe I should move to Pitt, though.

tomhath

Maybe put each article a separate file. Have a database table with the article title in one column and the file name in another. Use that table to populate radio buttons or selection box options so you can add/remove as needed without having to change the page.

Handle the onchange or onclick event with javascript to submit the form (pass the filename or table key column id through the button or option value). Use a php "include" to insert the file and redisplay the page.

Didn't try it but it should work. Examples of populating an HTML table/select/radio button should be easy to find.

Your "need pointed" grammer is a common Western Pennsylvania usage...

wilhud

Thanks for the quick replies tom, but I think I'm still doing a bad job of explaining. Let me give you an idea I had and see what you think.

Basically, my table contains four columns; id, date, title, body. I'm thinking maybe I could add another column called front_article or something like that. Then, whatever record has front_article set to true I'd pull and display on my home page. That's no big deal, I've got that much done.

What I want to do though, is if I decide to set front_article to true in a new record, I need to also set the old record to false. That way I don't get two results. This is where my problem lies. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is. Or if this is even a good idea. Maybe there's an easier solution. Not sure.

Thanks, Wil

tomhath

You'll need a form (to pick the new id) and two updates when the form is posted. Probably want to have a password field on the form if anybody can get to it.

update mytable set front_article = "FALSE" where front_article = "TRUE"

update mytable set front_article = "TRUE" where id = $selected

wilhud

That's spooky...I was just writing that exact code. The variables were a little different, but here's what I did.

$sql = "UPDATE News SET Headline='0' WHERE Headline='1'";
$sql = "UPDATE News SET Headline='1' WHERE ID=$topstory";

Same right? Strange thing happens though. When nothing is set to 1, it works fine, but if something is already set to 1, then that field remains 1 and the new field becomes 1 also. Almost as if it's ignoring the first line of code.

I'm going to check my form and see if it's setup properly. Because this should work.

wilhud

Cool, it works perfect, I just forgot to duplicate my:

$result = mysql_query($sql);

Thanks for the help Tom!