php & mysql random function

tsinc80697 · 10 Mar 2007 at 22:48

I need to create a website using php and a mysql database with 1 table.
(its a sweet shop)

The table has already been created for me and populated with data.

I have to create a shopping cart for the website which can add products from the table into it. Im assuming this involves session as I am new to php so I may be wrong!
But on the main page of the site i wanted to create a "sweet of the day" which would be a random selection from the database of the sweets name and image, which are under the columns sName and sImgName.

I've seen someone make a random function on these forums that picks a different sig every time the page is loaded, will that do the job or is it completely different as every time i will have to be querying the database?

Any help will be much appreciated, and anyone that has some spare time over the next 48hours with a good amount of php/mysql knowledge if they could add me to MSN i'd be their friend forever

tsinc80697 · 10 Mar 2007 at 23:10

either really, whatever is easiest to do as i could jsut change sweet of the day to sweet of the moment or something.

Might help if i give more data.

The sweets are organised by something called "uid" , so if the randomiser changed this number everyday/time the page was loaded, then i could link it to the other columns?
ie

1 Toffee Toffee.jpg
2 JellyBean Bean.jpg

etc

So if the number were to change it would change what was linked to it therefore changing what is in the DIV, im just guessing here as i have no idea about mysql really

or php for that matter

tsinc80697 · 10 Mar 2007 at 23:21

that will randomise every time the page is loaded?

Ill try it out with xhtml aswell to see if it works like i want to

Thanks

tsinc80697 · 11 Mar 2007 at 17:24

another question for mysql people!

In the database i have sCategory, each sweet has a category.

For building the menu system i wanted a list of each different category, so it would list:

Fudge
Bubblegum
Chocolate Bar

At the moment i can pull the sCategory out fine and display it, but if there are 3 sweets with sCategory=Fudge, it will display Fudge 3 times.

How can i do it so it takes the data, checks for multiples, deletes them and therefore just displays 1 line for each category?

So instead of showing

Fudge
Fudge
Fudge
Bubblegum
Bubblegum

it would go to

Fudge
Bubblegum

Thanks!

tsinc80697 · 11 Mar 2007 at 18:43

thanks a lot for those 2 things

ill be asking more questions soon as i get stuck, which wont be long