Multiple search query

cody44

I am attempting to set up a small database for a friend who is in the estate agent business. I have set up the database and have tested it "live". All seems to be working okay for now.
In the database it contains 7 fields, being
id
address
bedrooms
price
description
image
area

I am now looking at the index page to have a multiple search for the viewer to have a choice of the criteria they wish to search by, these being

No. of bedrooms (this will be a drop down box containing 2, 3, 4,5 or 6 bedroom choices)
Price (drop down boxes from and to) ie Minimum price to Maximum price.

And then an area to choose. These will be predefined boxes to tick maybe 4 areas. I want it so that if none are ticked then all areas will be brought into the search.

Once the form is submitted then it will return the search of six properties per page. Is there any good coding available for me to use, or has anyone got some pointers that I could use.

Would appreciate any help on this.

Mark

sinbad

I don't understand yet what do you mean by :
"And then an area to choose. These will be predefined boxes to tick maybe 4 areas. I want it so that if none are ticked then all areas will be brought into the search."

But on the top of my head, the query i would suggest would be something likeL

SELECT (whatever fields) FROM tablename
WHERE bedrooms = ' whatever the user seleted'
AND area = ' whatever the user seleted';

cody44

Hi Sinbad,
Thanks for your help..................will try to expand.
I have created the database with the following fields (7)

id
address
area
bedrooms
price
description
image

I have done a quick index.php page and it displays all the properties in the database with images (Felt so good when I got that far).

Then I have done a page called admin_2.php this is where you can upload the information onto the database, delete or edit the information. I will soon put a user function on here because the estate agent staff will be uploading the images themselves with the information. Tested this and it works fine.

What I am desperately trying to do now is set up a page that will do a multi search of the database. For example the page will have a Minimum price range and a Maximum price range this will be in the form of drop down boxes. Then another box indicating the number of bedrooms required (drop down box), and lastly a number of boxes indicating the areas, the viewer can click for example "Aigburth", "Woolton" and "Hale" from a selection of about seven boxes.

A good example can be found at http://www.vebra.com/home/quick/PFselect.asp?firmid=258&branchid=0&dbtype=1

The above example is in ASP........as I would need to do similar in PHP.

Now I know that this will need to be in the design of a form but im getting nowhere with it and having purchased several books on the subject there is little to suggest how it can be done.

The only fields to be searched above are;
area
bedrooms
price

has27

SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE bedrooms = 'numberofrooms'
AND (area = 'area1' OR area='area2' OR area='area3') AND price BETWEEN lowestprice AND highestprice

note brackets in the areas - you need to have that otherwise it will pick out everything in area 1 or 2 or 3.

If you're doing select areas on a checkbox, you'll get the results of the checkboxes back as an array, and you'll have to do a bit of looping through it to generate the code properly as follows...

Say your array is called $postedareas

$output="";
$numberofareas=count($postedareas);
for($i=0; $i<=($numberofareas-1); $i++){
//make the area query
$output.="area='".$postedareas[$i]."'";
//if it's not the last one, put in OR between them
if($i<=($numberofareas-2)){
$output.=" OR ";
}
}