Question

I have a script that grabs an xml of my database generated by php and I would like to shuffle the rows before the php script echos the xml so that each time i access the database xml file, I’ll receive the database in a different order.

here’s part of my php script that outputs the xml:

$dom =  new DOMDocument("1.0");
$node = $dom->createElement("database");
$parnode = $dom->appendChild($node); 

$query = "SELECT * FROM database WHERE 1";
$result = mysql_query($query);

header("Content-type: text/xml");


while ($row = @mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
    // ADD TO XML DOCUMENT NODE
    $node = dom->createElement("data");
    $newnode = $parnode->appendChild($node);

    $newnode->setAttribute("id", $row['id']);
    $newnode->setAttribute("name", $row['name']);
    $newnode->setAttribute("date", $row['date']);
    $newnode->setAttribute("latitude", $row['latitude']);
    $newnode->setattribute("longitude", $row['longitude']);

}

This is where I’d like to randomize the xml output if possible. This seems like the most logical place, but if there’s a better place, that’s fine with me.

echo $dom->saveXML();

Here’s a sample of my xml:

<database>
  <data id="1" name="blah" date="2012-10-10" latitude="0" longitude="0"/>
  <data id="3" name="blah" date="2012-10-10" latitude="0" longitude="0"/>
  <data id="4" name="blah" date="2012-10-10" latitude="0" longitude="0"/>
</database>

Simply put, I would like the xml rows to be in a different order each time i access it. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

One way around this problem is to use a temporary array to store the rows fetched from DB, then shuffle this array, then walk through it:

$records = array();
while ($row = @mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
    $records[] = $row;
}

shuffle($records);

foreach ($records as $row) {
    $node = dom->createElement("data");
    $newnode = $parnode->appendChild($node);

    $newnode->setAttribute("id", $row['id']);
    ...
}

The other way is use the original array as it is, but randomize the insertion process instead:

$prevnode = null;
while ($row = @mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
    $node = dom->createElement("data");
    if ($prevnode && rand(0, 1) === 0) {
      $newnode = $prevnode->insertBefore($node);
    } else {
      $newnode  = $parnode->appendChild($node);
    }
    $prevnode = $newnode;

    $newnode->setAttribute("id", $row['id']);
    ...
}