Display results in multiple html tables - php

Question

I have been making a volunteer sign up sheet for our hockey club. I display the results in a table using a while loop.
Everything works good, but I am now wanting to make the output a little more user friendly. I order the query by the date and display it in a single table. What I would like to do is display a new table for each different date. The heading of that table would be the date and the rows would have all events for that date ordered by time. I think this would make it easier for people to find events on a specific date.
Here is how my table is set up: id, date, time, game, name1, name2, name3, name4, name5
Here is the query on my main page:
<?php
//displays the table
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM namestable ORDER BY date, time ASC");
displayTable($result);
?>
This is my function:
<?php
function displayTable($result){
echo "
<table border='1'>
<tr class='top'>
<th class='date'>Date</th>
<th class='time'>Time</th>
<th class='game'>Game</th>
<th class='name'>Name</th>
<th class='name'>Name</th>
<th class='name'>Name</th>
<th class='name'>Name</th>
<th class='name'>Name</th>
<th class='sign'>Sign Up</th>
</tr>";
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
//change the date format here
$fdate = date('M jS, Y l', strtotime($row['date']));
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td class='date'>" . $fdate . "</td>";
echo "<td class='time'>" . $row['time'] . "</td>";
echo "<td class='game'>" . $row['game'] . "</td>";
echo "<td class='nameA'>" . $row['name1'] . "</td>";
echo "<td class='nameB'>" . $row['name2'] . "</td>";
echo "<td class='nameA'>" . $row['name3'] . "</td>";
echo "<td class='nameB'>" . $row['name4'] . "</td>";
echo "<td class='nameA'>" . $row['name5'] . "</td>";
$id = $row['id'];
echo "<td class='sign'>" . "<form name='input' action='process.php' method='POST'>
<input type='text' name='name' maxlength='25' value='Enter Name' onfocus=\"if(this.value=='Enter Name') this.value='';\"/>
<input type='hidden' name='id' value='$id'/>
<input type='submit' value='Sign Up' />
<input type='submit' name='dname' value='Remove Name' /></form>" .
"<form name='delete' action='delete.php' method='POST'>
<input type='hidden' name='id' value='$id'/>";
if(isset($_SESSION['user_id'])){
echo "<input type='submit' name='delete' value='Delete Event' /></form>" .
"</td>";
}else{
echo "</form>" .
"</td>";
}
echo "</tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
echo "<br />";
}
?>
Users can enter a name to sign up and delete their name.
The admins can add and delete events.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Since your results are already ordered by date, you can just store the previous date in a variable and create a new table every time this changes.
$olddate = '';
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$fdate = date('M jS, Y l', strtotime($row['date']));
if ( $olddate != $fdate ) { // date has changed:
// end the previous table (if it exists)
if ( $olddate != '' ) {
echo "</table>"
}
// start the new table. Do something with $fdate here if you like
echo "
<h3>$fdate</h3>
<table border='1'>
<tr class='top'>
...
</tr>";
}
// print a row as before.
echo "<tr>";
....
}
// end the last table
echo "</table>";
Basically the only thing that has changed is that the $fdate is stored also in $olddate. When we process a new row, if the date has changed (ie $olddate != $fdate), we create a new table.
For each row in the mysql result we still generate a table row as before (you may want to make some changes like not including the Date column any more).

Answer 2

$getdates = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT date FROM namestable ORDER BY date DESC");
$dates = mysql_num_rows($getdate);
if($dates > 0){
echo "<table width='100%' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0'>";
while ($rowdates = mysql_fetch_assoc($getdates)) {
$date = $rowdates['date'];
$getevents = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM namestable WHERE date = '$date' ORDER BY time ASC");
$events = mysql_num_rows($getevents);
if($events > 0){
echo "<tr><td>$date</td></tr>";
while ($rowevents = mysql_fetch_assoc($getevents)) {
$event_time = $rowevents['time'];
// all other info you want to pull here
echo "<tr><td>ROW WITH EVENT INFO HERE</td></tr>";
} // end event loop
} // end if events > 0
echo "</table>";
} // end if dates > 0
} // end date loop