Concept Help Needed: Tables and Displaying All Rows - php

Question

I have an upload system in my site where users can upload files and write a brief description of them. Each upload has a corresponding SQL entry.
Another page on my site will then display every file uploaded along with some traits about that file
The question is:
How can create a table with a variable set of rows and how can I set a table to automatically populate the new rows?
I am capable with PHP but still a novice, weak with HTML (I use a wysiwyg) and completely inexperienced with Javascript.
Any nudge in the correct direction would be hugely appreciated...

Answer 1

In order to make the rows of your HTML table "dynamic" using PHP, you should use the foreach() control structure. For example, say you have some code to grab the data from the database and it returns it as an array or some sort of result statement that implements an Iterable interface (we'll call it $results), you can then:
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>File Name</th>
<th>Description</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<?php
foreach($results as $result)
{
// Start row
echo("<tr>");
echo("<td>" . $result->filename . "</td>");
echo("<td>" . $result->description . "</td>");
// End row
echo("</tr>");
}
?>
</tbody>
</table>

Answer 2

You can use a loop to populate the table based on results from a query of your database. Here's the code I use for one of my pages:
$result = $db->query_read("SELECT dice.RollID AS `Roll`, dice.Limit AS `Limit`,
dice.Value AS `Value`, dice.Dateline AS `Dateline`, dice.Comment AS `Comment`
FROM dice
ORDER BY Dateline DESC LIMIT 25");
// ###### MAIN CODE ######
$str = '<table>
<tr><th>ID</th><th>Roll</th><th>Time</th><th>Comment</th></tr>';
while ($resultLoop = $db->fetch_array($result)) {
$ID = $resultLoop["Roll"];
$roll = $resultLoop["Value"] . '/' . $resultLoop["Limit"];
$when = date('m-d-Y H:i:s', $resultLoop["Dateline"]);
$comment = $resultLoop["Comment"];
$str .= '<tr>
<td>' . $ID . '</td>
<td>' . $roll . '</td>
<td>' . $when . '</td>
<td>' . $comment . '</td></tr>';
}
$str .= '</table>';
echo $str;
One thing to note is that I use $db->* functions because it is integrated with a forum software. You should be using mysqli_* functions as found here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysqli.php