Question

I have a two part question with no code to show, but i hope you can help:

Essentially, i have a website which lets businesses create a profile for themselves (original table schema here).

Now within the site I want a form with three select lists in it: the first select list is for business catagory/tag – I have managed to create a query which will return entries from my main business registration table by using a Toxi solution.

However i also want a second select list with countries or regions, and a third select list with states/counties which will load automatically BASED on the selection from the Country select list.

Then naturally, on submitting the form, i want to return the results to the visitor.

So, apart from wondering how to achieve this much in PHP/MySQL, i have a more fundamental question about whether to set up the countries/states ‘tagging’ or ‘catagories’ field as another Toxi solution, or if there’s a better way to do it. For instance, should i/can i just create seperate tables to populate the select lists with states/counties based on country selection, and have the actual country and state fields that a business selects on registration, stored within my main business table, and just match the strings when the user hits submit, in order to reduce queries to MySql and improve speed?

As always, your advice and help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Dan

Answer 1

Think about the “full name” of a state (or whatever political division is one level narrower than “country”). In the Americas, here are some “full names” of states.

• California, US
• Connecticut, US
• Ontario, CA
• Sonora, MX
• Lara, VE

Base your lists on a two-column table of the full names of states.

ISO country codes

The critical point is that your selection lists shouldn’t allow values like “Alabama, MX” or “Sonora, US”.