PHP Recordset Paging

Imagine that you have a recordset containing 100 records, for example. Usually you wouldn't want to display all 100 records at once, as it's far too much information for a web site visitor to take in at once, and it can also make your web pages slow to load. Instead, it's much more desirable to be able to show the user 10 records at a time for example, and let them move back and forth between pages. A perfect example of this is a search engine such as Google, although it can be used on any web site that uses dynamic data.

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3.2 Creating the HTML and PHP to display the Results

Switch back into Design view in Dreamweaver MX, and add a table to the page, as shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1 - Example Table Layout

This is an ordinary HTML table with 2 rows and 3 columns to display the Title of the Tutorial, the Author's name and the Date the tutorial was published.

Note that x's have been used to mark where the dynamic data will go, and this makes it easier to find the correct place in Code View.

First, were going to make the table row where the records will be displayed a repeat region, so that a table row is created for every record in the recordset.

Select the table in Design View by clicking on an outer edge of the table so it becomes selected as shown in Figure 1 above. Next, switch into Code View, and you'll see the HTML code for the table has been highlighted and will look similar to that shown below.

<table width="600" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
  <tr>
    <td width="300">Tutorial Title </td>
    <td width="200">Author</td>
    <td width="100">Date</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td width="300">xxxxxxx</td>
    <td width="200>xxxxxxx</td>
    <td width="100">xxxxxxx</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Code Block 3 - HTML Code for the results table

If you look at the code above you can see that the code for the second row above is highlighted in blue. To make this row repeat once for each record in the recordset stored in $recordset we just need to wrap a PHP foreach() loop round the HTML code, as shown below (highlighted in green).

<table width="600" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
  <tr>
    <td width="300">Tutorial Title </td>
    <td width="200">Author</td>
    <td width="100">Date</td>
  </tr>
  <?php foreach($recordset as $record){ ?>
  <tr>
    <td width="300">xxxxxxx</td>
    <td width="200>xxxxxxx</td>
    <td width="100">xxxxxxx</td>
  </tr>
  <?php } ?>
</table>

Code Block 4 - HTML Code for the results table with Repeat Region

With the foreach() loop in place the HTML for a table row will be sent to the browser once for each record in the array $recordset. Each time round the loop, we can refer to the current record using the variable $record.

Our next job is to replace the x's that act as placeholders with the dynamic data from record in $record. Change Code Block 4 as shown below.

<table width="600" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
  <tr>
    <td width="300" class="tableHeading">Article Title </td>
    <td width="200" class="tableHeading">Author</td>
    <td width="100" class="tableHeading">Date</td>
  </tr>
  <?php foreach($recordset as $record){ ?>
  <tr>
    <td width="300" class="tableData"><?php echo $record['title']; ?></td>
    <td width="200" class="tableData"><?php echo $record['author']; ?></td>
    <td width="100" class="tableData"><?php echo date("d/m/Y",$record['dateTime']); ?></td>
  </tr>
  <?php } ?>
</table>

Code Block 5 - HTML Code for the results table with Repeat Region & Dynamic Data

In Code Block 5 above, you can see that we use the PHP echo() command to output the data in each field to the screen. Because the database record is in the form of an array, we use the fieldname so that PHP knows which field we're referring to e.g. $record['title'] to access the title field in the current record.

For the datetime field, because the date is output as a UNIX timestamp, we can use the PHP date() command to format it for us, so that it outputs in the form of dd/mm/yyyy.