Getting contents of fields in MySQL to a drop-down list

fouwaaz

Hello PHP gurus,

I am very new to PHP and am trying to develop a web-site.

There is a MySQL table holding category ids and category names. Now I want to give the end-user a neat list of the category names in a form field and then grab the corresponding id to update another table.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks & Regards

jpmoriarty

ahhh ha! my first bit of help! This probably is an inefficient bit of code since it's one of the first that I've written, but it does the job for me!

<select name="userid">

<?

  mysql_select_db("movement");
  $query = "select * from users";
  $result = mysql_query($query);
  $num_results = mysql_num_rows($result);

  for($i=0 ; $i < $num_results ; $i++ )
  {
    $row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

  ?>

<option value="<? echo htmlspecialchars( stripslashes($row["userid"])); ?>"> <? echo htmlspecialchars( stripslashes($row["name"]))."\n";
  }

?>

</select>

Notice that the only way i could get the right " and ' symbols was tgo drop out of the PHP and include plain old HTML for some bits. I've also used the htmlspecialcharacters() and stripslashes() to make sure that there are no & symbols or " or ' in the username or userid - dont know why there would be, but a good idea to check that theres not anyway! It uses the userid field for the value of the options, and the name field for display.

Hope that helps!

fouwaaz

Thanks very much John -- now that works. I managed to do it in a slightly different way as follows:

$query="select * from merchandise_major_categories";
$result=mysql_query($query);
echo "<select name='category'>";
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo "<option value=\"".$row['merchandise_major_cat_id']."\">".$row['merchandise_major_cat_name']."</option>"."\n";
}
echo "</select>";

Now, I am grappling with a consequent problem viz, to do the same exercise with a minor category table that has a foreign key linked to the major categories.

For instance, if the end-user had selected the major category bearing id 3 -- then in my second pull down list I want to list all "minor_category_names from minor_categories where major_category_id = 3".

Is this possible?

Thanks in advance.