Pull a data from db where each array holds the column name category and its subinfo

Question

I am trying to create an accordion menu where each accordion menu pulls the rutines of workouts where it differs by the category column in the db example below;

I got my PDO::db design like this;

id title describtion category hashtags video seen date_published

how can i pull the info from the database by the category to use it in foreach in my view file. I hope i could make my problem clear enough.

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You could order by category and then name (make sure you have an index on category, name) Your Query would be:

SELECT * FROM `workouts` ORDER BY category, name

Then when you iterate you check if the category changed and if, close the sublist and open a new one showing the category first.

Another, slightly cleaner Solution would be to iterate twice, using the first loop to sort in an associative array by category:

$sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM workouts");
$sth->execute();

$workouts = array();
/* First Loop */
while(($result = $sth->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) !== FALSE) {
    $workouts[$result['category']][] = $result; 
}

Now you can loop over $workouts, using the key as the Category.

foreach($workouts as $category => $workoutsByCategory) {
  //display category and start subset
  foreach($workoutsByCategory as $workout) {
    //display workout
  }
}  

It would be a lot cleaner thou to use a second table which holds the category names and use the id of that table in your workouts table to connect. You can then get the results using join. You might want to look into Relational Database Design and Normalization

Example (not tested) Table Layouts:

table "workouts"
id | category_id | title | description | hashtags | video | seen | date_published
table "categories"
id | title

Then you can get the results using:

SELECT workouts.*, categories.title as category_title FROM workouts LEFT JOIN categories ON (category.id = workouts.category_id)

This will make it easier to change the name of a category amongst other advances ... but you'll read up on that i guess.