Question

Can someone advise me if I am performing the below steps correctly:

When a user wants to register on the website, register.php handles his/her request. Below is some of the code from register.php:

$sql="INSERT INTO Members (fldFullName, fldEmail, Password, Gender, DOB)
VALUES
('$fname','$email','$pass', '$gender', '$date')";

Particularly when I wrote the above code, I was somewhat new to PHP/MySQL and still am. Therefore, I made all of the fields above manually in the table via phpmyadmin. Furthermore, I also added the ID field manually via phpmyadmin, as the first field with auto increment and primary key of course. Why I did it manually, I can’t remember the reason of. But I’m pretty sure that this may be the reason why I’m having problems.

What I’m trying to do is, when a user registers on the website, I want a profile URL to be created for him/her. For example, the field in the table could be named ProfileURL, whereas the actual value could be http://www.domain.com/profile.php?id=1, where the id is inherited from the actual ID in the table. How can I do this with my above code? Did I do something wrong when I decided to save all the fields manually via phpmyadmin? Note: I’ve also been creating tables, databases, fields manually via phpmyadmin. However, its values are INSERTed automatically of course. Am I even on the right track?

Thank you.

Answer 1

As stated above, you don’t need to save a profile URL to the database. I’m guessing all profile URLs are going to follow some standard form (i.e. www.example.com/profile.php?id=1)?

Well, if you saved all of those in your database and then you decided you were going to change the format to something like www.example.com/profile/1 you’re going to have a lot of out-of-date data in your database. You’re going to have to go through each record and update it, and that could be dangerous on a database table with say, millions of rows.

Therefore, the solution is to have a script that takes a parameter. Say profile.php. As above, you would check for the profile using the data in the $_GET array:

<?php
if (isset($_GET['id'])) {
    $id  = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['id']);
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM members WHERE id = '$id' LIMIT 1";
    $res = mysql_query($sql);
    if (mysql_num_rows() > 0) {
        $member = mysql_fetch_object($res);
        // handle displaying of member's profile here
    }
    else {
        // member does not exist with ID
    }
}
?>

That way, if you decide to change the script name or use search engine-friendly URLs, you don’t need to change your database structure.