loop help

[MDanz]

i've been doing while loops for this problem .. i dont think its the right way though.

 

i have a set of boxes each with a boxid(apart from the first), which is the id(mysql) of the previous box. 

 

e.g.

box 1 has id 1

box 2 has id 2 and boxid 1,

box 3 has id 3 and boxid 2 etc

 

you see the boxid is the same as the previous id.

 

i want 10 boxes to display , when i'm trying to loop this i am using a while loop, but i keep on having to use another while loop inside, just to match the boxid with previous id, to get the next box to display. so i would have to do 10 while loops inside one another, which isn't good practice.

 

is there a better way to do this? for loop? 

 

another example

 

e.g.

box 1 has id 239

box 2 has id 456 and boxid 239,

box 3 has id 123 and boxid 456 etc

 

[Pikachu2000]

Where are these values coming from?

[MDanz]

the id comes from mysql.

 

when i add a new box, the boxid is the id of the previous box and so on.

 

 

 

 

[MDanz]

[id=239] [id=456,boxid=239][id=123,boxid=456]

 

how would you go about doing this? instead of multiple while loops inside each other.

 

i've been doing mysql_query select boxid='$previousid' and then doing while loop inside while loop per box.  there must be a better way.

[Pikachu2000]

From your description, I'd be inclined to read the query results into an array, then go through that array with php to format the output. Running queries in loops is a resource hog.