Question

I am stuck with this, I have been putting myself through a crash course in PHP all week making a fake amazon like site! I want to order my table using a drop down menu but cant work out how! I know the SQL thats the easy bit but the way I have tried to do it is follows:

Set up variables for example

$query = "SELECT bookname, bookauthor, bookpub, bookisbn
                FROM booktable
                ORDER BY bookname ASC";

$query2 = "SELECT bookname, bookauthor, bookpub, bookisbn
            FROM booktable
            ORDER BY bookauthor ASC";

Then I have my form=

<form name="sort" action="products.php" method="post">
<select name="order">
   <option value="choose">Make A Selection</option>
   <option value="title">Title</option>
   <option value="author">Author</option>
   <option value="publisher">Publisher</option>
   <option value="isbn">Book ISBN-10</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value=" - Sort - " />
</form>

Now for the bit I cant do,

I set up the variable:

$sort = $_POST['order']; 

so that whatever the value of the dropdown menu is, will become assigned to the variable $sort….. (is that right?)

then I want to say IF the value of $sort is the same as lets say ‘author’ than $query = $query2
but I dont know how to say it without huge error courtesy of XAMPP!

I hope this all makes sense and that my method to try and achieve it is close to correct

Thank you

Answer 1

To sort I would do the following:

Change the option values to match the column names from your table
Set your sort option including a default if they haven’t selected anything:

$sort=$_POST["order"]!="choose"?$_POST["order"]:"bookname";

then simply set your query to use:

ORDER BY ".mysql_real_escape_string($sort)." ASC

This way you only need one query, rather than a query for each case.