searching wildcards from a form

voll

Hopefully someone can help me with this. I have a search form with several SELECT fields where the user can select an option "ALL", which should be a wildcard for that field. If it is selected for any of the fields, I get no results. Here is the line of code I am using to search the database.

 $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE year='$year' AND award='$award' AND state='$state' AND class='$class' ORDER BY award");

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have already spent a few hours trying to figure this out.
Thanks in advance.

Shrike

It could be that regiser_globals is not set in php.ini. You shouldn't really use that anyway.

$sql = "SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE year='$year' AND award='$award' AND state='$state' AND class='$class' ORDER BY award";
echo $sql; //Check that $sql actually contains a valid statement
$result = mysql_query($sql);
echo mysql_error();

swr

You need to generate the SQL statement in a slightly more dynamic manner, in order to get the "ALL" effect...

$sql = "SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE 1 = 1";
if ($year != "ALL") $sql .= " and year = '".mysql_escape_string($year)."'";
if ($award != "ALL") $sql .= " and award = '".mysql_escape_string($award)."'";
// etc...

The "1 = 1" bit is so you can always add " and ...". Without it you'd need to figure out which one is first (which could be any of them) and exclude the "and", otherwise you'd get "where and ..." which is an error. The "1 = 1" thing is simpler.

voll

Works like a charm!
Thanks alot for your help.