html select in php

[wiss.dev]

Hi Guys,
i have a list of records that i'm displaying in a table, in which i have two select boxes. i managed to populate the options and select the appropriate value but i believe it was inefficient. here is how i do it.
in the table loop, i call a function that queries a table and create a string

// function im calling
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($aJobs))
{
$sOptionSelected='';
if ($row['job_id']==$jobId){$sOptionSelected='SELECTED';}

$sJobOptions= $sJobOptions . '<option value="'.$row['job_id'].'"'.$sOptionSelected.'>'. $row['job_desc'] .'</option>';
} 

is there a better approach to do so? ?
thanks

[fjober]

Hi,

this code seems good, (I didn't change the PHP, but validated it as html code).

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($aJobs)) {
    $sOptionSelected = '';
    if ($row['job_id'] == $jobId) {
        $sOptionSelected = 'selected="selected"';
    }
    $sJobOptions = $sJobOptions.'<option value="'.$row['job_id'].'" '.$sOptionSelected.'>'.$row['job_desc'].'</option>';
} 

q. from where do you get the value of $jobId?, please write more code

Feras Jobeir

[wiss.dev]

this works for me, but i was wondering if there was another way of doing it in php. i just think its inefficient in terms of performance.
e.g. if i have a table with a 1000 row, for each row i call a function to query the jobs list and build a string of options, and select the appropriate option value

jobId is a variable passed to the called function.

thanks any way

[fjober]

This depends on your data, how they locate in the database, are they related to others (so we can get them using the least number of queries).

To get a fine answer, please provide the SQL structure of your table(s), and describe a little on how do you want them to appear in the page.

Feras Jobeir

[SambaNeko]

You could use mysql_data_seek() to re-use your result set and avoid repeating your query.

You could create a single string containing all of your HTML output, and do a preg_replace() for whatever's selected...

<?php $options = '<option value="1">1</option><option value="2">2</option>'; ?>
<select>
<?php echo preg_replace('/(value="'.$jobId.'")/', "$1 selected", $options); ?>
</select>

...is that a good idea?

What I'd probably choose is to fetch my data once, re-use the result set, iterate it each time (for each <select> element), and output my HTML in-place as it goes (don't make a string of it).