Re: Random question selection in PHP w/ MySQL backend.

Adam, I'm what I would call a novice to PHP and databases in general, however if I had to do what you're doing, I might do the following... Add a field to the table that contains your questions called "displayed" and have it be an enum of Yes/No True/False, etc... In your script, you'd then query for all the questions that haven't already been displayed. Then get a random one of those (plenty of randomizing functions in PHP I believe). Display it, mark it as displayed in the db... Next time, it won't even get returned in the query. I don't know if you have to do this on a per-user basis or what. If so, you will probably have to create a session table and keep track of the questions each user has viewed... Hope this gets you started... Cheers! My 2 ¢ John Pickett http://www.bvstudios.com/ Co-Author: Inside Dreamweaver 4 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735710848/xtremist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adam Lundrigan" <ceo@vpu-virtual.com> To: <php-db@lists.php.net> Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 2:32 PM Subject: [PHP-DB] Random question selection in PHP w/ MySQL backend. I'm having a bit of trouble creating a random question selector. I'm using PHP 4.0.6 and MySQL 3.23.36 on Windows 98 SE. I've tried several different solutions, but none work at all. What i need to do is select 10 questions from a database (db: vpt, table: questions), and make sure that the same question doesn't appear twice. The questions need to appear in a random order each time the script is loaded. It sounds simple enough, but i just can't seem to get it to work. Any suggestions?? Thanks in advance, -Adam Lundrigan CEO, VPU http://www.vpu-virtual.com/ ICQ # 73617446 ceo@vpu-virtual.com