Database Interface Reading List

[jokobe]

I want to insert data into a reading list. The data are:

Title, author and year.

I want to insert the data with a php/html form page. My problem is:

there is for each item only one title, but there one or more authors.

How can I solve the prob? Is there a possible solution like with MSACCESS forms:

Just form with a subform for the many authors?

Any helpful hint?

[liquorvicar]

there are several ways to achieve this. if you know there is an upper limit on how many authors there are for a book, you could add extra fields to the Books table, i.e. author_1,author_2,author_3 etc.
or you could create a separate authors table, i.e.
author_id --- author
1 --- J.Bloogs
2 --- D.Smith
3 --- F.Bar
and then have an authors_books table linking the two.
author_id --- book_id
1 --- 1
2 --- 1
3 --- 1

[jokobe]

Thanks for your answer, but my prob isn't the database design, I'm not sure how to build the php/html form and insert the data from there into the database.

[liquorvicar]

well, you'll need to decide how many authors you're gonna offer your users and have that many corresponding form fields (or use javascript to get a dynamic form).
you can use

name="author[]"

in each form field to pass the values through as an array.