Arrays and mysql

[julian_chamberl]

Hi,

I want to develop a site where businesses offer several services. I have set it up so that they can only select one from a drop down box at the moment. I would like for them to be able to select as many as they provide and for these to be stored on the database or where it should be stored? So when a customer searches for companies that supply a certain service it will search and list them. I have looked and pretty sure this is not a hard task but I am failing in a big way!

I have very little knowledge of arrays and or MySQL. As it stands it works well with just one selection but limits what I want to achieve.

Any help or guidance would be so much appreciated.

Thank you.

Jules

[laserlight]

julian chamberl wrote:

I want to develop a site where businesses offer several services. I have set it up so that they can only select one from a drop down box at the moment. I would like for them to be able to select as many as they provide and for these to be stored on the database or where it should be stored? So when a customer searches for companies that supply a certain service it will search and list them.

So, you have many businesses and many services, and each business offers zero (one?) or more services. This many to many relationship can be represented by having one database table for business, one database table for services, and another database table (also called a join table) that maps each business with a particular service that it offers.

This way, if you want to retrieve a list of all companies that offer a given service, you join the tables such that the service is the given service. When the business info is entered, you loop over the list of services and add an entry in the join table for each one.