Desinging a form to make DB entries editable?

j_cal1

Hi,

I want to design a page where users can edit records they own in the database.
I'd like to present them with a dropdown listing 2/3 colums from all their records, if they select the record from the dropdown i want the relevant data to appear in a HTMl table for editing or deletion, is this possible in PHP?

If so could anyone point me towards some tutorials?

Thanks

TobyRT

Yup, it's possible

I looked for a few tutorials, but didn't find anything much good until I bought a book called "How to do just about everything with PHP & MySQL.

For your drop down:

Connect to the db
select (say) the title and ID
use a while () loop to put all the records into a dropdown with links to an update page.

For the page:

model it on your 'add record' page, but connect to the db first to pull all the fields through for that id.

INstead of a blank 'title' field that you'd use to fill information in:
<input type=text name="title">

Fill the value in frmo the database:
<input type=text name="title" value="<?php echo $row['title']; ?>"

Then the SQL at the end is just a simple update query:

php
$title=$_POST['title']

sql query
"UPDATE my_table SET title = '$title', article='$article'"

and so on.

j_cal1

Thanks thats very helfpul, is it possible to have the editable records on the same HTML page as the dropdown? I don't want them to navigate away from the dropdown page to edit the records, if possible.

TobyRT

Of course...instead of making the link to another page, but make the form <form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>"> rather than 'update.php'

You basically now have three things you want to do on this page:

1) display a drop down of the items in the db, clicking them will display the 'edit' function
2) display a dropdown of the items in the db, below which you have another form which contains the relevant fields for editing
3) when the user clicks 'update' it performs the sql query to update the db

let's call the file 'manage.php'
let's name your 3 actions: 'view', 'edit' and 'update'

Your first state is inherent - if i go to yoursite.com/manage.php, it's automatically 'viewing' - no action has been specified, so all i get is the drop down.

The dropdown links, however, refer to an action:

<form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>?action=edit">

<form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>?action=update">

All you need to do now is tell it what to do when it gets those actions:

if (!isset($_POST['action']) //if the action is not received
{
echo 'Here is the dropdown of articles'; //you're in 'view mode' as it were, so just display the dropdown
}
else
{
$action=$_POST['action'];
}

if ($action == 'edit') //if you're telling it to edit
{
//connect to server
//retrieve fields for that id
echo 'html for the drop down here'; //show the drop down
]<form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>?action=update">//start a form 
echo 'show the fields populated with values from the db for that record id';
echo 'have a button here to submit the form';
} //you've now finished telling it what to do if you want to edit

if ($action == 'update') //now you've edited the information and are ready to update it
{
//connect to server
//get variables from the form
mysql_query("UPDATE mytable SET title='$title', article='$article' WHERE id=$id") //perform the SQL query to update them
echo 'something nice to say to confirm that the update has been successful (or not)';
}

Hope this helps!

j_cal1

Thanks again!