Deleting records from MySQL

[dcj1978]

Ok, i'm trying to put together a nice admin section for a site i'm working on and I have a section where data from mysql is printed out along with "Delete" and "Edit" links...like this..

[ DELETE ] - [ EDIT ] - row 1 title - row 1 data
[ DELETE ] - [ EDIT ] - row 2 title - row 2 data
[ DELETE ] - [ EDIT ] - row 3 title - row 3 data

What I want to do is make the "[ DELETE ]" text a clickable link that will delete its record from mysql.

Any ideas?

[ir4z0r]

when generating the output (like your example), then print the
links like "admin.php?action=del&row=3"

at the beginning of admin.php you have a switch() which gets the
action value, there you can perform the deletion

but be aware that the URL can be entered manually by an unauthorized
person maybe?

<?PHP

  switch($_GET['action'])
  {
    case "del": // "DELETE FROM table WHERE id = $_GET['row']"
                      break;
    case ...
  }

  // output loop here

?>

[dcj1978]

Ok, so I change the url but i'm not sure where to put that case statement.. I'd like to be able to have it so i'm looking at admin.php and the delete link goes to admin.php, deletes the record and displays an updated list.

Here's my code so far..

/* Database Settings */
	$db_name = "database";
	$db_user = "username";
	$db_pass = "password";
	$db_table = "table_name";
	$db_server = "localhost";



/* Connecting, selecting database */
$link = mysql_connect($db_server, $db_user, $db_pass)
or die("Could not connect");
// print "Connected successfully";
mysql_select_db($db_name) or die("Could not select database");


/* Performing SQL query */
$query = "SELECT id, title, text FROM $db_table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed");


echo "Admin Section";

if ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

do {
echo "<tr><td>";
echo "<a href=\"admin.php?action=del&row=" . $row[id] . "\">[ DELETE ]</a>";
echo "</td><td>";
echo " - <a href=\"http://edit_an_entry.php\">[ EDIT ]</a> - ";
echo "</td><td>";
echo $row["title"];
echo " -";
echo "</td><td>";
echo $row["text"];

echo "</td></tr>";
} while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result));
} else {print "Sorry, no records were found!";
}

[dcj1978]

Thanks for the help, I used the url like you said and it worked..

admin.php

echo "<a href=\"delete.php?delid=" . $row[id] . "\">[ DELETE ]</a>";

delete.php

$query = "DELETE FROM $db_table WHERE id = $delid";

Now, with delete.php, since i'll be doing this all in a session, I could set it so that if the admin isn't logged in nothing can be done. That way not just anybody could go to that url and run the script right?

thanks again

[ir4z0r]

theoretically, yes

you need a session var which identifies the user as admin, you
can then easily check its state and so a simple if-else statement

I guess that's the proper way 🙂