[Resolved] forms and mysql databases

Haris_P

I'm making a car website where a user has 4 drop down boxes to choose his car make, model, year, and trim.

What I want to do is if a user selects a make, lets say Honda, the model drop down box should only list honda models. Now if the user selects civic, the years the civic was made should only be in the year drop down box, etc. etc.

Would it be best to use a mysql database for this kind of stuff, or just hard code every make, model, year, etc. which would be potentially long.

Also how would I go about doing this using mysql? I know how to connect to mysql, database, I'm just not familiar on how to code this.

Thanks. Any input would be appreciated

AstroTeg

You can use WDDX (built into PHP depending on the version) and a client-side javascript WDDX library. User selects Honda and you can use WDDX to transfer that info behind the scenes to your server which then queries the database to find available models. Once they're found, PHP formats the data into a WDDX packet and sends it back to the browser. The browser then updates the model list box with the list found in the database. Rinse and repeat for the other boxes.

The beauty about this approach is its very lightweight in terms of the amount of database data you have to query for and send back to the user (in the above example, you wouldn't be sending your entire database to the client for them to try parsing in JavaScript).

The only real problem with this is with understanding WDDX and how it all works. But its really not very difficult and there's a lot of good tutorials out there (see google).

That solves the problem of presenting the data to the user. The other trick is actually getting the data into the database. I presume you've got this sorted out already.

Haris_P

thanks, i'll look into that. I already know how to add data using forms into the database. My next project will be passing the data taht was selected from the user and displaying it all on a pre templated php page. I'll try do that before I post any questions.