starting again - advise needed

[bubblegum]

Hi - This is what i'm trying to make:

An online questionaire using dreamweaver (with php) and sql

I have three tables in sql:

TOPIC - topic name, topic id
QESTIONS - topic id, questionid, questiontext
ANSWERS - questionid, answer1, answer2, answer3, answer4, correctanswer

There are 4 topics each containing 5 questions. each question has 4 possible answers.

What I need to do now is have a simple page that says if the topic is customer services then bring up and display all the five questions and the possible 20 answers on that page along with 20 radio buttons so the user can choose one out of the four answers for each question.

What would be the best way to go about starting this - i've tried all sorts but keep getting stumped on the radio buttons

I then need to give each answer a mark and add up the total for the survey

any ideas on how or where to start?

[Shrike]

Each question should have a radio button group with the name being the question_id and each value being the answers. Since when the user submits the form you'll want to pick out the answer fields from the $_POST array it might be an idea to prefix each radio group with a certain string (e.g. 'question_1'). Then it's a simple foreach loop to grab the answers.

You'll then need to query the database again to see which answers were correct. It'll be tempting to do one query per question but it's possible to get all results in one query with some SQL trickery using the IN construct. I'll leave you to figure that out 😉

[Blulagoon]

You might also like to make some changes to your ANSWER table:

If you had the following:
question_id // The id of the question
answer_id // The id of the answer for that question 1,2,3 or 4
correct // enum field of yes/no, will be no for 3 of the answers and yes for the correct one
mark // you could give each answer a mark, some wrong answers more marks than others.

HTH - Blu