Another Update

Yesterday night I went ahead and finished the column changing buttons, and got everything working as it would appear to the end user. It was all static though, every name put in by hand.

I came to work today and determined to finish converting to PHP. And I did. That went very quickly actually, because each version of the table became a simple while loop.

The biggest problem though, happened when I needed to get the number of students from the database to my javascript file. This was necessary because the list of students is inside a container div, which has no default height set. If it had a static height, then the list might overflow, of the page might be longer than needed. If it had no height, then when less students are displayed, the header would follow the bottom of the list up, and could overlap with the search panel.

So the height of the container is set each time the page loads as the height necessary to show all students. This is accomplished by using each student's unique ID from the database. I access the max ID, and that is the number of students. Each student is 42 px in height, and the column titles are the same. So the number of students plus 1, times 42, is the total height.

The problem was getting the number of students to the javascript file. I tried using the PHP to set an invisible div's class to that number, and then use attr class in jQuery. But while it would grab the number, say 14, it wouldn't be a number. It would be a character 14.

After about a half hour, I finally moved that section of the jQuery code into the html main doc, and just uses PHP to create the line, num_students = 14;. It is now working, and the last thing I have to do is fix the multiple orders of display.