Viewing an image from a related table

Claire:  Right now, one table just lists a set of Air Force ranks and the image (RANKS).  The main table has the personnel information, including name, position, email, rank.  The rank field in this table is a list linked to the RANKS table.  The only field it will let me display is the text rank field, not the uploaded image.

Does that help?

Ragi

Yes, it does! What you'll have to do is use a second getRecords function to get the RANKS table, and then create a new array of ranks with the num of each rank record as the index to the record. Then if you're outputting the personnel records, you can use the indexed array to get the uploaded photo.

Claire:  I got everything except the "..create a new array of ranks....".  Not sure how to do that.

Ragi

P.S.  Is this what you mean?

<?php
  // load records from 'staff'
  list($staffRecords, $staffMetaData) = getRecords(array(
    'tableName'   => 'staff',
    'loadUploads' => true,
    'allowSearch' => false,
    'debugSql'    => false,      // optional, display SQL query, defaults to no
  ));

  // load records from 'ranks'
  list($ranksRecords, $ranksMetaData) = getRecords(array(
    'tableName'   => 'ranks',
    'loadUploads' => true,
    'allowSearch' => false,
  ));
  
  $rankStructure = getRecords(array(
    'tableName'   => 'ranks',
    'orderBy'   => 'num',
));
?>


No no, there's a particular way of setting up an array so that each record is easily accessible. So you start with this:

// load records from 'ranks'
  list($ranksRecords, $ranksMetaData) = getRecords(array(
    'tableName'   => 'ranks',
    'loadUploads' => true,
    'allowSearch' => false,
  ));

The $ranksRecords come out as an array indexed in the order that they're picked from the database. So it looks like this:

array(
  0 => record 1,
  1 => record 2,
  2 => record 3...

etc. What you want to do is re-sort the array so that it's indexed to the num of the ranks records, and you do it like this:

$sortedRanks = array();
foreach ($ranksRecords as $rank) {
  $sortedRanks[$rank['num']] = $rank;
}

Now when you're looping through the $staffRecords, you can access the right rank record to display the picture by selecting the right index in the $sortedRanks, like this:

$rank = $sortedRanks[$record['rankNum']];

Change 'rankNum' to the right variable name, of course. This is a convenient piece of logic to use when you have a set of records that can be applied to multiple others.