Complex Search Forms

ljschrenk

Ok, I have a little bit of a large request. I've been putting off a project for months now and just want to find the fastest and easiest way to get it done. I don't mind writing the code myself, and have already done that for the basic searches, but if there's a better or quicker way that someone might know of I would really appreciate it.

The project is simply a listing of churches in the area. People should be able to come to the site and do a search based on 7 categories. Not all the categories need to be filled out. It's a lot like the www.findachurch.com form on their main page. Although the form will have drop down lists and check boxes where users can check as many boxes that apply.

Does anyone have any advice on how to get started with the complex search form? Or should I just sit down and start drawing it out and use a bunch of IF ... then statements?

Any help would be great! Thanks so much for your input.

Lisa

cgraz

yeah. It's really quite simple. Run the search dynamically. Assuming you have the churches stored in a MySQL database; name the field names in your form to match the field names in the database, and the values in the form to match the values in the database, then, simply use something like this (code hasn't been tested; should work, but may need minor tweaking)

$query = "SELECT * FROM your_table";

foreach($_POST as $key => $value) {

   if($query == "SELECT * FROM your_table") {
      $query .= " WHERE $key='$value'";
   } else {
      $query .= " AND $key='$value'";
   }

}

print $query; // to make sure it is working properly. You can remove this later

$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

Cgraz

ljschrenk

Thanks for your reply. Will this code work if I'm using several tables? Pretty much each part of the form uses a different table with the main church info table linking them all together.

I'm normally not this stupid. 😃

Lisa

cgraz

yeah, you'd need to tweak the code depending how your table is set up. I'm not very experienced with using multiple tables, but at the very least, you could select the id then run another query to select the info from the other tables.

Cgraz