Functionality that I regularly create in applications is the ability to take a SQL statement and return a table of results for reports, debugging, etc. Here's a helper function I created to implement this functionality. I purposely left off pagination, sortable columns, and other features to focus on how the Drupal theme_table() function operates. This helper function will use the column names from the SQL as the table column headers, so make sure they are properly formatted.
<?php
// first, I defined this function in my module:
function _MYMODULE_sql_to_table($sql) {
$html = "";
// execute sql
$resource = db_query($sql);
// fetch database results in an array
$results = array();
while ($row = db_fetch_array($resource)) $results[] = $row;
// ensure results exist
if (!count($results)) {
$html .= "Sorry, no results could be found.";
return $html;
}
// create an array to contain all table rows
$rows = array();
// get a list of column headers
$columnNames = array_keys($results[0]);
// loop through results and create table rows
foreach ($results as $key => $data) {
// create row data
$row = array();
// loop through column names
foreach ($columnNames as $c) {
$row[] = array(
'data' => $data[$c],
'class' => strtolower(str_replace(' ', '-', $c)),
);
}
// add row to rows array
$rows[] = $row;
}
// loop through column names and create headers
$header = array();
foreach ($columnNames as $c) {
$header[] = array(
'data' => $c,
'class' => strtolower(str_replace(' ', '-', $c)),
);
}
// generate table html
$html .= theme('table', $header, $rows);
return $html;
}
// then you can call it in your code...
function _MYMODULE_some_page_callback() {
$html = "";
$sql = "select * from {node}";
$html .= _MYMODULE_sql_to_table($sql);
return $html;
}
?>