inserting

Anon

question that is probably easy for you people that have been using dbs for a while now:
can i insert more than one selection into a database ?
reasoning being that i am constructing a funding database for students and there are funds offered to more than one field of study - meaning that if a student in geography searches for geography funds - he will find the funds that are offered to his program AS WELL as those that are offered to his AND others .... for example.

Scholarship: Field of study offered to:
#1 Geography, Architecture

#2 Geography

#3 Architecture

Now, if i were a geog student and i conducted a searrch - i would want to find #1 AND #2, not just #2 whereas if i was an Architect, i would want to find #1 and #3 not just #3. so this is why i want to know whether the selection can be made to choose more than one field when inputting the data into the system. Im assuming this must be possible and so am wondering is this something i have to declare on the database side or is it a php thing or what ? im using a select box that is populated through a script automatically from the field table in the database.

edwardsbc

This question is not easy to answer in the form stated. This is about database design and has little to do with PHP or even SQL really. I would approach the problem by creating a scholarship table and a field table and relate them with a primary/foreign key. Thus scholarship #1 above would have two records in the field table, one for Geography, one for Architecture.

tbl_scholarship
PK: AUTONUMBER
S_NAME: VARCHAR(x) (or similar character field)
... whatever else you need here

tbl_fields
PK: AUTONUMBER
FK: INTEGER
F_NAME: VARCHAR(x)
... and maybe others

The example table would look like this:

TBL_SCHOLARSHIP
PK S_NAME
1 Scholarship1
2 Scholarship2
3 Scholarship3

TBL_FIELDS
PK FK F_NAME
1 1 Geography
2 1 Architecture
3 2 Geography
4 3 Architecture

Now to get what scholar ships are available for a field ("Geography") use a join

SELECT tbl_scholarship.s_name, tbl_fields.f_name
FROM (tbl_scholarship INNER JOIN tbl_fields ON tbl_fields.fk = tbl_scholarship.pk) WHERE f_name LIKE 'Geography'

This would return:
s_name f_name
Scholarship1 Geography
Scholarship3 Geography