PHP112

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Main Page >> Web Application Development >> Workbook >> Simple HTML/PHP/MySQL example

A Simple HTML/PHP/MySQL Example

The following example will:

  1. use a form to gather criteria for a search
  2. pass the criteria to a PHP script
  3. build a custom query
  4. execute the query against a database, returning results
  5. output the results

1. A form to gather criteria (pets-form.html)

<html>
  <head>
   <title>Part 1 - Form</title>
  </head>
  <body>
   <form action="pets-search.php" method="post">
    <p>
     Enter pet's name: <INPUT type="text" name="searchName">
    </p>
    <p>
     <INPUT type="submit" value="Search">
    </p>
   </form>
  </body>
</html>

2. The PHP script (pets-search.php)

<?php

// Connect to server/database
$mysqli = mysqli_connect("localhost", "bdtuser", "bdtuser", "bdtheque");
if (mysqli_connect_errno($mysqli)) {
    echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
}

// Build custom SQL query
$sql = "SELECT name, species, age FROM pet";

// Add search criteria, if provided
if($_POST['searchName'] != "")
  $sql.= " WHERE name LIKE '%" . $_POST['searchName'] . "%'";
  
// Run SQL query
$res = mysqli_query($mysqli, $sql);

// How many rows were returned?
$num_pets = mysqli_num_rows($res);

if($num_pets == 0)
  print("<p>No pet with that name, sorry...</p>");
else {
  print("<p>We found $num_pets pet(s) matching thay name...</p>");
  
  // Loop through resultset and display each field's value
  while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($res)) {
    echo $row['name']. " - ". $row['species'] ."<br>";
  }
}

?>

Deconstruction of the example

A lot of the code above is similar to the previous section, so let's focus on what's new:

pets-form.html

This line in very important:

<form action="pets-search.php" method="post">

It specifies that anything entered in the current form should be posted to a file called pets-search.php. Obviously the latter should match the name of YOUR file.

On this line of code:

Enter pet's name: <INPUT type="text" name="searchName">

It is important to note the name of the text field ("searchName"), as we will need it in the script below.

pets-search.php

Ready to move on?

Let's tackle this week's mini-task!