PHP How to display data from database in specific sections? - php

Question

I've been doing searches on how to make php output sections but couldn't find anything.
Let me explain my project and what kind of help I'm looking for exactly. I'm working on a player database that saves player results from tournament matches for a specific video game. The database will then be used by tournament commentators for pre-game analysis for the viewers. Here's the part I'm stumped on, I want the tables to be displayed in a way that's super easy and quick to find specific results.
My current setup is PHP displays data from the mySQL server in a table, which is functional but super hard to sift through, especially later on when there will be three to five more variables.
Example:
Event : -EVENT NAME-
Date : 5/19/2013
Map Names : -Map 1- -Map 2- -Map 3-
Results : -Winner- -Loser-
Event : -EVENT NAME-
Date : 5/19/2013
Map Names : -Map 1- -Map 2- -Map 3-
Results : -Winner- -Loser-
I would like to know how to make it where the information is displayed in tournament name sections, such as:
Event: -Tournament Name 1-
Event: -Tournament Name 2-
Then when you click on the specific tournament you want, it'll show you all of the results for that tournament. Could anyone point me in the right direction as to where to learn how to make this happen?

Answer 1

Seems like you want to display events, that expand event-related information when clicked. The jQuery UI accordion widget might be an appropriate way to handle such a data display. Have a look here:
http://jqueryui.com/accordion/
The section names shown in the demo are your events, and the text shown when they're clicked is your event text

Answer 2

make Event: -Tournament Name 1- a link like Tournament Name 1
then in tour.php, you check the $_GET['name'] and use that in your db query to look up the results

Answer 3

I'm not totally clear on how you want to achieve this but I can think of a couple options. You can use Javascript to expand a section below the Tournament Name without ever requiring the browser to do a postback, or you can simply have the tournament name linked to another page.
Option 1 (DHTML):
<script>
function showSection(tournamentID) {
document.getElementById('section' + tournamentID).style.display = 'block';
}
</script>
<?PHP
...
while ($row = ... ) {
?>
<a href="#" onclick="showSection(<?PHP echo $row['tournamentID']; ?>);return false;">
<?PHP echo $row['tournamentName'];?>
</a>
<div style="display:none" id="section<?PHP echo $row['tournamentID']; ?>">
Event: ... <br />
Date: ... <br />
Map Names: ... <br />
</div>
<?PHP
}
?>
You can use JQuery to do some cool effects, like slide down or fade in. The example above is just straight javascript and will simply show the section - but won't use any transition effects.
Option 2 (Link):
<?PHP echo $row['tournamentName'];?>
On tournamentDetails.php you would process the $_GET['id'] variable and query the database for the remaining information about that tournament and display it on the page.

Answer 4

To me it sounds like you want to output the data with a javascript/css accordion collapse. You can search for accordion collapse code snippets using javascript libraries like JQuery. An example of an accordion can be found on the Twitter Bootstrap site at: http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/javascript.html#collapse
This should help alleviate the long table listing you have now, and only display the Tournament names initially unless a user wants to view more info on it, selecting the tournament to drop down more information about that tourny only.