Question

I have a page which, when a user visits it, makes a MySQL call to a DB, and then puts that information into an html table presented to the viewer by the time the page initially loads.

I want to allow more advanced refinement options, like filtering by name, age, etc.

when the user submits their refinement options, how would I clear out the “old” data in the HTML table that is displayed on page load, and then re-populate it with the “new” data PHP returns?

Will this require DOM manipulation via JS? How can I specify the target node to echo out my PHP into?

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

When the data you wish to display is available from a server and is not yet in the browser, you can make a AJAX call to go to the server and pull the data back from it for display.

A common use case for this is when you are displaying live information which could be periodically updated

What is ajax?

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