Displaying a multi-dimensional array and accumulating totals
How to properly display data from a multi-dimensional array has been a classic problem for any web developer. For illustration, assume you wish to display a list of customers and their purchases. For each customer, you wish to show their name, phone number, account balance, and so on. This already represents a two dimensional array where the x axis represents customers and the y axis represents data for that customer. Now add in purchases and you have a third axis! How can you represent a 3D model on a 2D screen? One possible solution would be to incorporate "hidden" division tags with a simple JavaScript visibility toggle.
How to do it...
First we need to generate a 3D array from a SQL statement that uses a number of
JOINclauses. We will use theApplication/Database/Connectionclass introduced in Chapter 1, Building a Foundation, to formulate an appropriate SQL query. We leave two parameters open,minandmax, in order to support...
