Question

Long time reader, first time poster, so please forgive what could be a stupid question…

I have a table in my database (I’m creating a Basketball Fantasy Keeper League Draft) that has the order of the draft (pick number, GM nominated to make that pick, picked player, the time the pick was made [there’s a 12hr draft window] and whether the pick is a keeper pick or not) so what I’m trying to do is detect if the next pick is a keeper pick and if it is, run a few more queries, etc etc. I can do it if there is only ONE keeper pick where a GM would normally make a selection, but what happens if there are 2 or more keeper picks in a row?

So instead of doing a bunch of nested IF statements where I run a query selecting the next pick from the table and checking if it’s a keeper pick or not 3 or 4 times (see below):

$query1Counter = "SELECT counterID FROM draftCounter";
$query1Result=mysql_query($query1Counter);
$livePickCount=mysql_numrows($query1Result);

then:

if ($livePickCount != "") {
    //Do stuff then:
    //run $query1Counter again, then:

    if ($livePickCount != "") {
        //Do stuff then:
        //run $query1Counter again

        if ($livePickCount != "") {
            //Do stuff then:
            //run $query1Counter again
        }
    }
}

I was hoping that I could pull ALL the results from the table like:

query = SELECT * FROM keeperLeagueDraftOrder;
$result=mysql_query($query);

pull out the specific column value like:

$keeperPick=mysql_result($result,$i,"keeperPick");

and then, since it’s either 1 for a Keeper Pick and 0 for a normal pick, possibly do a loop like:

WHILE $keeperPick=1 {
    //Do all the stuff that would skip the row here
}

So that it loops in case there are 2 or more Keeper pics in a row, otherwise, once it gets to the first value where keeperPick==0, then it goes about it’s normal business.

My problem is that I’m not a proper programmer and am only fudging my way through this stuff by googling and copy/pasting and some tweaking where needed, and only used to really simple loops.

Sample table (where the first draft pick has been made as well as 4 Keeper picks nominated [no draft time]):

draftPickID  draftPickPlayerID  draftPickGM  keeperPick  draftTime
1            72                 5            0           2012-09-10 22:04:24
2            10                 3            1           0000-00-10 00:00:00
3            32                 2            1           0000-00-10 00:00:00
4            0                  6            0           0000-00-10 00:00:00
5            0                  1            0           0000-00-10 00:00:00
6            5                  4            1           0000-00-10 00:00:00
7            44                 4            1           0000-00-10 00:00:00
8            0                  1            0           0000-00-10 00:00:00
9            0                  6            0           0000-00-10 00:00:00
10           0                  2            0           0000-00-10 00:00:00

Answer 1

If you are just trying to get the lowest draftPickID out of the database where keeperPick = 0 and draftPickPlayerID = 0, why not just use this database query?

SELECT * FROM keeperLeagueDraftOrder
WHERE keeperPick = 0 AND draftPickPlayerID = 0
ORDER BY draftPickID ASC
LIMIT 1

This eliminates any need for looping or anything else. It just gets you to the next pick in the draft that requires an actual selection to be made.

Also, you should really look into using mysqli_* functions as use of the mysql_* functions is discouraged.