Question

I have a question regarding the creation of Auto Dynamic text boxes within PHP. The scenario is like this:

• I have 2 tables in a MySQL database.
• The 2 tables (students/teachers) have different number of fields
• Teachers = 8 fields / Students = 5 fields
• A page for inserting new data into the tables is created.

So now there is a need to allow the “insert” page to auto generate the number of fields found within the table to allow inserting of data instead of creating 2 different PHP pages for the website.

I think that by including array into <input type="text" name="TableFieldArray[]" size="40" maxlength="256"> can be used to auto generate the number of fields needed for the insertion of the new data.

Anybody can give me some suggestions?

Answer 1

adapted from example #1 on this page in the php manual:

<?php
$result = mysql_query("SHOW COLUMNS FROM Teachers");
if (!$result) {
    echo 'Could not run query: ' . mysql_error();
    exit;
}
if (mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
        echo "<label for=\"ff-{$row['Field']}\" >{$row['Field']}</label>";
        echo "<input id=\"ff-{$row['Field']}\" type=\"text\" name=\"{$row['Field']}\" size=\"40\" maxlength=\"256\" />";
    }
}

That will give you one <input> element for each column in the Teachers table. The input elements will be named the same as their corresponding mysql columns.