Create A People Directory with SQL/PHP

Anon

Thanks you for writing this post.

I wish to implement a search for people directory page. With the following textfield fields:
FirstName, LastName, Dept.

I do know how to store them as session variables. But how do I formulate the SQL statement for it?

A user might just enter only 1 (or 2) of the 3 fields? My concern now is how to formulate the where portion dymanically ie

select * from Staff where ???

bastien

just create a series of if then statements to buld the query.

sql= "select * from staff where "
if ($firstname)
sql = sql . " firstname like " . $firstname
elseif ($lastname)
sql = sql . " lastname like " . $lastname
elseif ($dept)
sql = sql . " dept like " . $dept
end if

you get the idea.

hth
Bastien

Anon

My search form has actually 10 fields for the user to make a query. Thanks for the earlier suggestion, Bastien but it does not really work for all the possibilities 10 fields can produced. Some fields maybe left blank too.

Anon

It should work...you'll just end up with 10 if statements.

Diego

jowatkins

This will also work, but again it will only allow for one search criteria:

the form has an option list, an input box and select

<form action="PeopleResults.php" method="post">
<table valign="top" align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="1">
<tr>
<th colspan="3" align="center">Find Contact</th>
</tr>
<td>
<select name="searchtype" value="searchtype">
<option value="FirstName">First Name
<option value="LastName">Last Name
<option value="Based">Site
</select>
</td>
<td>

<input type="text" size="20" maxlength="20" name="searchdata" value="">
</td>
<td rowspan="2" width="15px"><input type="submit" value="Search"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>

then the query is :

query = "SELECT * FROM people
WHERE people.$searchtype LIKE '$searchdata' AND people.status = 'CURRENT EMPLOYEE'
ORDER BY LastName";

$result = mysql_query($query);

Anon

Allow me to add on ...

How should I formulate my SQL statement where the user has more than 1 search criteria? Because it is a search page, I will not know if the user is search by name or age or gender or in any combination.

Thank you.