Question

I am in the process of making a quick PHP based forum, and each post in a forum will appear under its “parent” post, but slightly more indented.

To get all the posts in that order, I have the following function:

    private function getData($pid, $offset)
    {
            $sql = 'SELECT id, subject, date 
                    FROM post 
                    WHERE forum_id = ? AND parent_id = ?';
            $sth = $this->db->prepare($sql);
            $sth->bind_param("ii", $this->id, $pid);
            $sth->bind_result($id, $subject, $date);
            $sth->execute();

            $data = array();

            while ( $sth->fetch() )
            {
                    $row['id'] = $id;
                    $row['subject'] = $subject;
                    $row['date'] = $date;
                    $row['offset'] = $offset;

                    //Add this 'parent' post to the data array
                    $data[] = $row;

                    //Before moving on to next post, get all its children
                    $data[] = $this->getData($id, $offset+1);
            }

            $sth->close();

            return $data;
    }

This isn’t working because I am executing another query before closing and fetching all the data from my current statement handler.

Is there a way to maybe separate the queries so they don’t conflict with each other? Or any other way to by-pass this? Or will I simply have to restructure how I get my data?

Answer 1

Fetch all the rows into an array, then loop over them.

$rows = array();
while ( $sth->fetch() ) {
    $row['id'] = $id;
    $row['subject'] = $subject;
    $row['date'] = $date;
    $row['offset'] = $offset;
    // the cool way is $rows[] = compact('id', 'subject', 'date', 'offset');
    $rows[] = $row;
}
$sth->close();

foreach ($rows as $row) {
                //Add this 'parent' post to the data array
                $data[] = $row;

                //Before moving on to next post, get all its children
                $data[] = $this->getData($id, $row['offset'] + 1);
}