Selecting clients using a drop down box

brockie99

Hi,
i am trying to pull up the details of a client in a form, by selecting their surname from a drop down box (select box). I think i will need to produce a while loop to get all the client surnames and insert them into the drop box from the database, to be selected by the user. Because i don't know how many clients i will have, i can't determine the number of options i need for the drop down box, and so this is why i think a while loop would be useful.
Any help or suggestions would be appeciated
thanks

Merve

If your using MySQL, then use [man]mysql_fetch_array[/man] to get the info, then use a foreach loop to populate the drop down list. If you are using another database, I believe that there are similar functions to mysql_fetch_array.

TheDoctor

<?
...
mysql cnx code
...

$sql="SELECT id, thing FROM table";
$result=mysql_query($sql);

$options="";

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

$id=$row["id"];
$thing=$row["thing"];
$options.="<OPTION VALUE=\"$id\">".$thing;
}
?>
...
html code
...

<SELECT NAME=thing>
<OPTION VALUE=0>Choose
<?=$options?>
</SELECT>
...

LoganK

Even easier still:

// For practicality purposes, the table has two fields = id and name
$sql = "SELECT * FROM clients";
$result = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());

echo "<select name='clients'>";
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
     echo "<option value='{$row['id']}'>{$row['name']}</option>";
}
echo "</select>";

LoganK

If this is resolved, please mark it so!