[timcadieux]

So, I'm a .Net programmer, I know I know, I apologise in advance :-)

I was building a website for a charity when someone in their organization decided to move their host to a PhP system. A buddy of mine who's supposedly a whiz in PhP told me, 'no problem, he would do it for me and it would be a good learning experience from me. That was about 6 weeks ago and I've gotten about 100lines of code so far, and it's buggy.

Here's the scenario, the site is a Veterans site and has the names and photos of about 125 000 soldiers in a mySQL db. I just need a search page that would have an A-Z type layout and a search button on the last name. Secondly, an Advanced Search with multiple dropdowns, one for each things like Service, Country, Rank etc that would allow the user to narrow the searches.

In .Net I could do that in about 1 day but I'm completely lost in Php, also largely in part because he's using these custom classes he wrote himself to separate the PhP from the HTMl, argh!

If anyone has some pointers, I'm all ears.

Thx in advance!

[Jcbones]

What you are talking about is not all that hard, and is easily accomplished in about a day (or less).

Once you have the syntax down, it's really very easy.

I would start here at W3Schools(dot)com <-still under 5 post limit.
and pay particular attention to $_POST, Forms, and MYSQL Select.

PHP Code:

<?php
//To help you get started, use:
//Assuming your table looks like:

$table = 'soldier';
$column = 'lastname';
 
// By using a wildcard (% = Denotes 0 or more characters) 
//we can pull any lastname that starts with this letter.
$pattern = 'a%';  //will pull any name starting with letter A.

//To search through a database use LIKE in your queries
$sql = "SELECT * FROM $table WHERE $column LIKE '$pattern'";
$query = mysql_query($sql);

//loop through the array
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query))
   {
     // Build your table here;
    //Edit: pull from table using;
       $lastname = $row['lastname'];
   }
?>

Of course, you can change those variables with $_POST from your form. I really see no need for a class (OOP) here, although I do confess of being to lazy to use much. A couple of good functions to pull the data, and a display page is all you should need.

[timcadieux]

I just wanted to mention that I did take this on myself and its goign well now, thx