Little PHP help

[Chris S]

I have this query

<?php
$album_views = mysql_query("SELECT SUM(views) FROM `photo_albums`") or die(mysql_error());
?>
There have been <?php echo $album_views; ?> total album views.

and i am getting resource ID #21

basically i want the number of views for the photo albums but when i run that i get the error

but when i put that into phpmyadmin it works. anybody know whats wrong

[Brandon]

Try this

$album_views = mysql_query("SELECT SUM(`views`) FROM `photo_albums`") or die(mysql_error()); 

Ill look more into it tommarrow
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[Corey]

Do print_r($album_views) and see what is says, usually a resource ID means it's in an array.

-Corey

[acidburn0520]

Shouldn't you be using $album_views['views'] rather than just $album_views?

[Torch]

Actually, mysql_query with SELECT statement returns a resource which isn't very useful to you untill you pass it to some function that converts it to data. In your case, the best one would be mysql_fetch_array. So what you need to do is:

<?
$album_views = mysql_query("SELECT SUM(views) FROM `photo_albums`") or die(mysql_error());
$album_views = mysql_fetch_array($album_views); //Makes an array out of internal object/resource
?> 
There have been <?=$album_views[0]?> total album views.

There you go, it should work

[acidburn0520]

Oh yeah... I'm so used to vBulletin -- it uses OOP, so everything is $db.

[Origin]

Plus you need to set it as SUM(views) as sum_of_views instead.

[Chris S]

torches worked. sorry it took me so long to answer