Question

So I am picking up a project that was quit halfway through by the last guy so that I could get some more practice with PHP and databases. I have run into a problem, and I am sure it is common enough that there is a standard solution, but I am unable to find one.

The db I am working with has 4,600, so reorganizing is out of the question. It is a db of liquers for a wholesaler. Here is what the results page looks like currently:

What I am trying to set it up so the results are returned in list form, with only one title and dropdown menus for the different sizes/prices of products that looks like this:

The problem is that there are multiple entries in the db for each product. In this example there are 3, while some have 1, and some have 2.

I am really not sure how to go about this, and any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

I’m not sure about the PHP syntax, but pseudocode here’s what you could do:

allProductsReturnedFromMySQL = QueryYourDatabaseForAllProducts()
Hashtable[productId, List[productSizes]] dropDownsByProduct;
Hashtable[productId, commonProductInformation] uniqueProducts;

foreach (product in allProductsReturnedFromMySQL) {
    if product.productId not in uniqueProducts
        then add it with the product information that does not vary

    if product.productId not in dropDownsByProduct
        then add it with an empty list

    append the size of this product to the corresponding list in dropDownsByProduct
}

After that little bit of logic you’ll have all your unique products with the common properties for each one, and a way to fetch the corresponding sizes drop down. If you wanted to do this purely in SQL to minimize the data that’s transferred, you could do something like this:

-- this would get you your products
select distinct id, property1, property2 from product

-- this would get you your drop downs by product
select id, size from product order by id

You can then build the same drop down hashtable by iterating through the second result set.