[PHP] Grouping years for display

[Adnams Drinker]

Probably just cause it's Friday and I'm knackered, but this has got me stumped ...

A client wants to show a list of the awards they've received over various years, and they want to be able to add future awards themselves, so the MySQL database fields I'm using consist of:

awardid (primary key)
year (stored as a year object in MySQL)
title (the name of the award - varchar object, max. 100 characters)
link (optional field containing a link to a detail page - varchar, max. 25 characters)

My SELECT query is:

SELECT awards.`year`, awards.title, awards.link FROM awards ORDER BY awards.`year` ASC

When I display them on the page I'm using the following:

<?php do { ?>
     <h2 class="pr"><?php echo $row_rsAwards['year']; ?></h2>
     <p><?php echo $row_rsAwards['title']; ?></p>
     <?php if ($row_rsAwards['link'] != "None") {echo '<p align="right"><a href="'.$row_rsAwards['link'].'">Show me the development &gt;</a></p>';} ?>
      <?php } while ($row_rsAwards = mysql_fetch_assoc($rsAwards)); ?>

It works fine in that it displays the data correctly in the format that I want, apart from the fact that for one year they got two awards. The <h2> head repeats, which looks a bit naff.

Is there any any simple way of stopping the <h2> from repeating if two or more consecutive records retrieved from the database have the same year - the idea being that the year heading in the <h2> will appear only once? Might not have explained that very well, so this might be clearer:

<h2>2001</h2>
((name of award))
((name of award))

<h2>2003</h2>
((name of award))

<h2>2004</h2>
((name of award))

I'm sure this is easier than I'm making it out to be - it's time I wasn't here and my brain has given up for the day ... any ideas or suggestions?

 

[Adnams Drinker]

We went away for the weekend soon after I posted the problem and I gave it some thought before reading your replies when we got home last night.

That'll teach me to try and write code late on a Friday afternoon when my brain has already convinced itself the weekend has started. I worked it out in the end and it was quite straightforward - where I loop through the returned results and output them to the screen, I've now got this:

<?php
	$prevyear = 0;
	$currentyear = 0;
		do { 
			$currentyear = $row_rsAwards['year'];
			if ($prevyear !== $currentyear) {
				echo '<h2 class="pr">'.$row_rsAwards['year'].'</h2>';
			}
                	echo '<p>'.$row_rsAwards['title'].'</p>';
                	$prevyear = $row_rsAwards['year'];
                	if ($row_rsAwards['link'] != "None") {
				echo '<p align="right"><a href="'.$row_rsAwards['link'].'">Show me the development &gt;</a></p>';
					}
                } while ($row_rsAwards = mysql_fetch_assoc($rsAwards)); ?>

It might not be pretty or ultra-efficient, but it does what I need it to do and more importantly, I worked it out for myself

Thanks for taking the time though gents ...

EDIT: Wahey, 1000th post - only taken me four bloody years