Question

I am trying to create a weighted banner system for my website.

This is my XML:

<banners>
    <images>
        <src>banners/ad_1.png</src>
        <alt>Banner ad 1</alt>
        <views>9</views>
    </images>
    <images>
        <src>banners/ad_2.png</src>
        <alt>Banner ad 2</alt>
        <views>9</views>
    </images>
</banners>

I want to display the image with the lowest view. Once I have that image, increment the view to show that the banner has been shown.

I don’t want to use simpleXML. All the dom manipulation will directly be using this $dom variable:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->load($file_name);

I have been at this for over 3 hours and my code just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I have figured out how to increment it and place it back into the XML file. I just don’t know how to pull the image that has the lowest views for display.

Any help, even ideas would be GREATLY appreciated!

Answer 1

$images = $dom->getElementsByTagName("images"); //Grab all image nodes
$views = array(); //Set up array for src and viewcount data
foreach($images as $image){ //Loop through all image nodes
   $src = $image->getElementsByTagName("src")->nodeValue; //Get the src
   $views[$src] = $image->getElementsByTagName("views")->nodeValue; //Add the viewcount to the array and use src as the array key
}
asort($views); //Sort the array by viewcount (low->high)
$src = array_keys($views); //Extract keys (or src)

$lowestViews = $views[0]; //Var for lowest number of views
$lowestSrc = $src[0]; //Var for the src of the lowest viewed image

I hope that helps! Sorry for mega commenting. Got bored.