I have a PHP script that displays data like this:

Eurasia
Eurasia<sup>island</sup>
Africa

Where Eurasia and Africa are mainland parents of
ecological regions and Eurasia<sup>island</sup> is a
parent of an ecological system that is associated with
a continent. For example, Borneo would be
Eurasia<sup>island</sup>.

The finished script will display an animal species'
distribution. Obviously, I don't want to say it lives
in Eurasia Eurasia.

Instead, I want to group them together, so an Old
World species like the leopard might look like this:

Eurasia
Africa

...no matter how many ecological regions it inhabits
on either continent, mainland or island.

The problem is that when I add GROUP BY to my command,
I lose the superscripts. It appears to favor a
particular row, and if that particular row represents
a mainland ecoregion, then EVERYTHING is defined as
mainland.

My script also displays footnotes that will eventually
name the islands it's native to. These, too, disappear
when I use the GROUP BY command.

Is there a simple solution you can think of? If not,
can you think of some sort of workaround, like a
separate table listing islands that I can somehow plug
into the system? Normalization isn't a priority; what
I'm doing is already over my head, and my primary goal
is user friendly - simply coming up with something
that works.

Below are some simple diagrams of my tables. Thanks.

ANIMALS TABLE
Canis_lupus | wolf
Panthera_tigris | tiger

JOIN TABLE
SPECIES | ECOREGION
Canis_lupus | NA1008
Canis_lupus | NA1010

ECOREGIONS TABLE
ID | NAME | Geog | Geog2
NA1008 | Alaska tundra | na | na
IM1003 | Philippine rainforest | eur | phl
(Note that mainland ecoregions feature the continental
ID in each of the last two columns, while island
ecoregions feature the island's ID in the last
column.)

GEOGRAPHY TABLE
ID | NAME
na | North America
phl | Philippines



        
                
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com

-- 
MySQL General Mailing List
For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql
To unsubscribe:    http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to