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Dynamic Table Sorting - Help!!!

Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 12:15 pm
by tomex1
Hi guys,
I have been learning php for some few weeks now and I must say I am getting better. At the moment, I am building an application which queries a database based on the values filled on a form and displays the result on another page when the user clicks the submit button.
The results are displayed in a tabular form with Column headings which works fine. Here is my problem - I want to give users the ability to sort the results based on the column headings. For example, when he clicks on the 'Name' column, the results should be sorted alphabetically.
I came up with the idea of redirecting the page to itself (i.e. the results page) and running an sql statement basing the ORDER BY on the column selected by the user. Obviously, what I didn't realise was that the values passed to the results page from the form using POST would have been lost, so I keep getting errors complaining about those values. I tried to create hidden fields and hide these values into them but it doesn't seem to work. I did a bit of research and I discovered php Sessions.
My question is - do you think I should use sessions to achieve this or is there a better way? Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Re: Dynamic Table Sorting - Help!!!

Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 1:33 pm
by SpankMarvin
I'm sure there is a better way of doing this than my suggestions, but there are a number of ways to bring over the values from the $_POST initial submittions.

The first is to use sessions to store the data in $_SESSION array. This has the advantage of being carriable over several pages until the session is destroyed. Alternatively, and if the info does not need to be secure, you could pass the data through to the same page using a GET method so that the values would be carried over through the URL (http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?firstv ... =something). You would need to look for these values in the page though.

There are also javascript solutions which might be a better way to go, as you'd not be querying the database multiple times.

Hope that helps

J

Re: Dynamic Table Sorting - Help!!!

Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 1:40 pm
by tomex1
Hi J,
Many thanks. I'll look into the various options you mentioned. You talked about a javascript option - how does that work? I'd prefer to go for the best solution as it will also be a learning curve for me.

Cheers

Re: Dynamic Table Sorting - Help!!!

Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 1:42 pm
by SpankMarvin
I'm not sure how hot you are on jQuery but this looks good:

http://tablesorter.com/docs/

I haven't used it but from the demo, it looks like what you're after, and no additional queries required.

Good luck

J