[ic] Refresh random number (solved)

Greg interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Thu Jul 4 10:17:01 2002


At 08:49 AM 7/4/02 -0500, you wrote:
>Happy Fourth of July to all...
>
>I have the following code which I was hoping would display a random item 
>image as a banner, one per each category. An image displays just fine, 
>however it never changes on subsequent page displays. Is there a method to 
>refresh the random number generator so that a new random selection is made 
>each time the page is visited?
>
><tr>
>[loop
>           random=1
>           search="
>                   fi=products
>                   st=db
>                   sf=category
>                   se=[item-field category]
>                   sf=image
>                   se=[item-field image]
>                   ra=yes
>                   ml=1000
>                   rf=code,include
>           "]
>
><td align="center"><img src="items/[item-field image]" width="150">
>[/loop]
></tr>
>
>Thanks.
>
>Greg

Found the solution (after I posted of course). Random selection works fine. 
My loop code (copied from an example) is wrong for this application. Here 
is the corrected loop code:

[loop
           random=1
           search="
                   fi=products
                   st=db
                   sf=category
                   se=[item-field category]
                   ml=1000
                   tf=category
                   rf=code,image
           "]

<td align="center"><img src="items/[loop-param image]" width="150">
[/loop]

Aside from my loop search being incredibly wrong, I was using [item-field 
image] instead of [loop-param image]. A related message from Kevin Walsh 
gave me a clue on this.

Now I get a random image from each category to be used as a banner image 
(or whatever).

Perhaps this will help someone else down the line.

Greg