--- Jigal van Hemert <jig...@spill.nl> wrote:

Well, I've already made one major change. I can see that this is going to be way too complex for me no matter what, so I split it into TWO queries. This query displays the native continents:

<? $query = "SELECT * FROM gwecoareasexp AS GW LEFT JOIN geog101exp as GG on GG.ID101 = GW.Geog WHERE IDX = 'IM0123' OR IDX = 'PA0408' OR IDX = 'AT1011' GROUP BY Geog"; $result = mysql_query($query); while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { $Geog[] = $row['Geog2']; echo($row['Name101']).''; echo '<br />'; } ?>

For example, if the species discussed is the yak, it would display this:

Eurasia

The giraffe page would display this:

Africa

The puma:

North America South America

For species that are native only to continental mainlands, that's all there is to it. I don't even have to worry about them in the second query.

The second query so far looks like this:

<?php $footnote = "SELECT * FROM gwecoareasexp AS GW LEFT JOIN geog101exp as GG on GG.ID101 = GW.Geog2 WHERE IDX = 'IM0123' OR IDX = 'IM0123' OR IDX = 'PA0408' OR IDX = 'AT1011'"; $result = mysql_query($footnote); while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { $Geog[] = $row['Geog2']; echo($row['Geog2']).''; echo($row['Name101']).''; echo '<br />'; } ?>

Its purpose is to identify species that are native to islands, then display a text message depending on whether or not that animal is also native to a continent.

For example, the following data tells us that we can forget about the yak, which is a purely mainland species.

yak | eur | eur Philippine eagle | eur | phl tiger | eur | eur tiger | eur | bal

The Philippine eagle page might display a message like this:

Eurasia* *Philippines only

The tiger page might display this:

Eurasia* *Including Bali

I haven't even plugged in my animal species table yet. I'm just using the WHERE clause to select groups of ecoregions from my table gweocoregions and experiment with them.

It's easy to eliminate mainland species, because their values in the fields Geog and Geog2 are identical; eur | eur for the Eurasia yak, for example.

For my second query, I would join Geog2 to the field ID101 in my geography table. So if Geog2 contains "phl", it would display "Philippines" from the geography table.

If that's still too complex, I might just hand code arrays grouping each continent's islands together and somehow draw the data from them.

For example... ' $Eurasia = array("Philippines", "Borneo", "Sumatra")

Then my PHP script could say something like, "Display this message if any name in this array appears and there is also a mainland region - like eur | eur - but display the other message if a name in this array shows up but there's no mainland ecoregion."

It's hard to even explain it, but that's a start. Thanks.