[Resolved] Dynamic Deletion

[ScubaKing22]

I'm making an administration area of my site where I would like the following. I have it so it displays all of the past news posts, but how would I add a delete link? What I mean is that next to, above, below, etc. each post I want a delete link that deletes that post. I have made one that did not work since I actually have no idea how. BTW the posts are accessed from a MySQL database. Please help, and thanks in advance.

[ednark]

here is a basic basic rundown... see if this gives you any ideas

the link on each article should send the id of the article to a deletion script via http get

<a href="/admin/delete_article.php?id=0">delete article 0</a>
<a href="/admin/delete_article.php?id=1">delete article 1</a>

delete_article.php need to AUTHENTICATE AN ADMIN don't leave access to this script public.

<?php
    # authenticate user
    # look for an id variable in $_GET array
    if ( isset($_GET['id']) ) {
        # do more authentication to assure the id is in a valid for and not null
        # create sql statement
         $sql = "Delete from ARTICLE_TABLE where id=$_GET['id']";
    }
?>

[ScubaKing22]

Newb question: is there a way to get the ID of a row? Your script gave me the idea that I could simply read the row number and create the link in your format above. If I could do that, then I do believe I could get the script working. Thanks.

[ednark]

yes there is, it is dependent on your sql system. im assuming you are using MySql. most people ive seen give each row an hand made ID column instead of actually figuring out the primary key from the columns.

CREATE TABLE mytable (
id bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment
)

you want to make use of the auto_increment feature

each table is given a counter, every row thats inserted then gets id=counter and counter is incremented automatically, no skin off your back

makes predicting ids easy but thats usually not an issue especially with something like articles

however any unique unique column(s) or primary key will do for this

[ScubaKing22]

OK not exactly what I meant. I already know about the unique ID system, what I'm asking is there a way to actually RETRIEVE the ID in a PHP script i.e. get the number of the row not how many rows there are.

[ednark]

im assuming you are referring to the insertion order? i don't see why you would need this at all since you can get right at each rows unique id number. when you do a select on a table, mysql actually renders a new result table for your specific query which depending on your constraints and sorting requests will not be in a constant ordering, so its useless to use the order of a select as an identificatio method. maybe this isn't what you are talking about but im trying to understand where you are coming from and what you want done.