Ford, Mike wrote: > On 16 June 2009 20:48, PJ advised: > >> Now, I was happy to learn that it is simpler to populate the >> insert new >> books page dynamically from the db. Much shorter & neater. >> It looks to me like the best solution for the edit page is >> close to what >> Yuri suggests. >> Since the edit page is very similar to the insert new books page, I >> merely need to populate the Select options box slightly differently. >> This is the code to populate the insert page: >> <select name="categoriesIN[]" multiple size="8"> >> <?php >> $sql = "SELECT * FROM categories"; >> if ( ( $results = mysql_query($sql, $db) ) !== false ) { >> while ( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results) ) { >> echo "<option value=", $row['id'], ">", $row['category'], >> "</option><br />"; } >> } >> </select> >> >> The problem nowis to find a way to add a conditional clause above that >> will insert the option="selected" in the output. >> The input for this comes from: >> // do categories >> $sql = "SELECT id, category FROM categories, book_categories >> WHERE book_categories.bookID = $idIN && >> book_categories.categories_id = categories.id";; >> if ( ( $results = mysql_query($sql, $db) ) !== false ) { >> while ( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results) ) { >> echo$row['id'], "<br />"; >> } >> } >> >> This may return any number of category ids so the problem is to figure >> out a way to pass the ids from the above code to the right ids in the >> first code above. How & what do I search to match the two ids? > > Well, if I'm understanding your queries correctly, you need to compare > the two sets of $row['id'] from the two queries above -- so your first > query should be the second one above ("SELECT id, category FROM ..."), > and you need to save the ids it returns for use in the loop which emits > the <select>s. This can be done by replacing the "echo $row['id']" with > "$selected_ids[] = $row['id']". Now you have an array of the selected > ids which you can use in your in_array(). So your finished code is going > to look something like this: > > <select name="categoriesIN[]" multiple size="8"> > <?php > // do categories > $selected_ids = array(); > $sql = "SELECT id, category FROM categories, book_categories > WHERE book_categories.bookID = $idIN && > book_categories.categories_id = categories.id"; > if ( ( $results = mysql_query($sql, $db) ) !== false ) { > while ( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results) ) { > $selected_ids[] = $row['id']; > } > } > $sql = "SELECT * FROM categories"; > if ( ( $results = mysql_query($sql, $db) ) !== false ) { > while ( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results) ) { > echo "<option value=", $row['id'], > (in_array($row['id'], $selected_ids)?" selected":""), > ">", $row['category'], > "</option>\n"; > } > } > ?> > </select> > > Hope this helps. It does, indeed. This confirms my inexperienced conclusion that in_array() does not work on associative arrays per se; it works on simple arrays and I just don't have the experience to think of extracting only the id fields. I actually am using a slightly more complicated if else statement which works. Also, the other problem was the option selected definition required Shawn's clarification <select name='component-select' multiple ... which now highlights the selected fields. In all my searches (horrendously wasted time) I did not find any mention of "component-select" either in php.net or w3c.org (I don't think my queries on Google brought up anything from php.net) but w3c.org did and I had looked at the page but somehow missed it. I'm going to have to look at the way I search things. When you are looking for something specific, other, even relevant, solutions seem to get screened out. Anyway, I learned quite a bit, here. Thank you very, very much, gentlemen. PJ -- Hervé Kempf: "Pour sauver la planète, sortez du capitalisme." ------------------------------------------------------------- Phil Jourdan --- pj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.ptahhotep.com http://www.chiccantine.com/andypantry.php -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php