Multi-field search page

setowmich

Hi, I have a question about multi-field search pages with php with a mysql db. I have a search screen with 5 fields, let say they are: last_name, first_name, age, sex, phone. Now if I run a search with all of those fields filled out I get the proper result. If I leave a field empty then it will insert the value “null” to my Select statement which will return a false result.

Now, I know that I can write if statements to solve this but this means that I would have to have 25 If else statement to for this little search page. Are there any ways out there to make this easier, maybe to make my Select statement dynamic? Any suggestions would help thank you all very much.

Joe

tsinka

Hi,

please post the code. That makes it easier to find a solution. There are several ways to solve that problem.

Thomas

setowmich

Here is the code. The search page collects the infomation from the user and pass it to result_search_pat.php and from there it will generate results. This example only has two variables. Again my problem is that right now if I do a search on all records witht he last_name "smith" I would get no results because it is looking for last_name ="smith" OR id="null".

Thank you again for your time

search_pat.php:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<table width="800" border="1" align="center">
<tr>
<td><h2 align="center">Hello</h2></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><div align="center"></div>
<table width="180" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<form method="post" action="result_search_pat.php" name="log">
<tr>
<td>MRN</td>
<td><input size = "20" maxlength = "20" name = "id1" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Last Name</td>
<td><input size = "15" maxlength = "20" name = "last_name" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"><div align="center"><br />
<input type = "submit" name = "submit" value = "Enter"/>
</div></td>
</tr>
</form>
</table></td>
</tr>
</table>
</html>

result_search_pat.php:

<body>
<?php
$id1 = $POST["id1"];
$last_name = $POST["last_name"];
$first_name = $_POST["first_name"];

//connection with database	
$link = mysql_connect("localhost", "user", "*****") or die("Could not connect <br>"); 
mysql_select_db("GammaDB") or die("Could not select database<br>"); 

$result = mysql_query("SELECT last_name, first_name, id1 FROM demographics_main WHERE last_name='$last_name' OR id1='$id1'");

if ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

echo "<table border=1>\n";
echo "<tr><td><h2>Last Name</h2></td><td><h2>First Name</h2></td><td><h2>MRN</h2></td></tr>\n";

do {

printf("<td>%s</td><td>%s</td><td>%s</td></tr>\n", $myrow["last_name"], $myrow["first_name"], $myrow["id1"]);

} while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result));

    echo "</table>\n";

} else {

    echo "Sorry, no records were found!";

}
?>
</body>
</html>