[Resolved] Dynamic Forms From MySQL Query

bladx

I searched around on Google and here on the forum for a while, but could not find an answer to something I've been trying to figure out lately.

I am working on a blog type of project... using MySQL to store data that PHP eventually outputs.

My question is: is there any way (and if so, please direct me to how to do this,) to when displaying a form (for example: a blog's owner updating user information,) to automatically generate a form that can determine whether a form input item should be a text or a textbox... or if it should be an upload input, etc.

The reason for why I want to know if this is possible... is because it would make creating forms a lot faster and more efficient as the project progresses, and if someone ever had to add another category to one of the tables in the database, it would be able to be added automatically to a particularly form.

I was trying to find out also if there is a way to attach a text attribute/comment to table fields... that way, I would be able to assign a certain word to each field of a table to use for later, to tell the PHP code how to display each field in a form... but I haven't seen a way this can be done, looking through the MySQL docs.

Thanks for any help... and if this question is not explained very well, let me know and I can try to clarify a bit.

Andy

cgraz

what about creating a second table that links the form fields with the type of input. For example, lets say you have the following form fields:

name, address, city, state, zip, comments

where they are all text inputs except for comments is a textarea

you could create a database that serves as a key and do

id/ reference / type
1 / name / text
2 / address / text
3 / city / text
4 / state / text
5 / zip / text
6 / comments / textarea

Then grab the key, match it with the reference column, and look to the type column to determine what type of input it would be.

Cgraz

bladx

That's a good idea... I was thinking about doing something like that--have a column that describes what type of element it is... and if the element is something that is visible or not. The only reason why I couldn't decide if I should go about it that way, is that if I added a new field or option or something I would have to add a new entry to this lookup table as well. But that actually isn't a big deal as long as I make that clear in my documentation... thanks for the help!

Andy