Question

as part of a HTML form I am creating I would like to have a dropdown list which will list all the usernames in my database.

I thought the following code would do the trick but the dropdown list is empty – could someone assist me in what i’m doing wrong? Thanks.

<tr>
<td>Owner</td>
<td>
<select name="owner">
<?php 

$sql = mysqli_query($connection, "SELECT username FROM users");

while ($row = $sql->fetch_assoc()){

?>
<option value="owner1"><?php echo $row['username']; ?></option>

<?php
// close while loop 
}
?>
</td>
</tr>

Answer 1

My guess is that you have a problem since you don’t close your select-tag after the loop. Consider separating your database-related code from the markup, it will help you to spot such mistakes easily

<?php
...
// SQL part
$sql = mysqli_query($connection, "SELECT username FROM users");
$data = $sql->fetch_all(MYSQLI_ASSOC);

// HTML part
?>
<tr>
  <td>Owner</td>
  <td>
    <select name="owner">
      <option value=""></option>
      <?php (foreach $data as $row): ?>
      <option value="<?= htmlspecialchars($row['id']) ?>">
        <?= htmlspecialchars($row['username']) ?>
      </option>
      <?php endforeach ?>
    </select>
  </td>
</tr>

Note that you have to either give the each value attribute a unique value or omit this attribute altogether. I added the row id as such value.