Question

I have created a php site, and previously it was listing only products with defined values. I have now changed it to include an array of products for example all products WHERE id = “spotlights”

and this works great so it means I can add new products just to the database, but I still have to add the second page manually. e.g going from the product div on the main page, through to http://www.example.com/spotlight_1.php

Is there anyway in PHP to carry the data from my index.php e.g. the ID through to the next page? so that I can have a template product.php page, and I can use a database pull to echo the product information required.

So on index.php i click on the product with ID=”1″ and on the product.php page, it loads the relevant data for product 1.

I can write the php SQL/mySQL calls myself, its just the way to carry accross a value from the previous page which I dont understand

Regards

Henry

p.s.
all the IDs and things are stored in the database already as 1 to 3digit values e.g. 3 or or 93 or 254

Any advice as always is greatly appreciated

Regards

Henry

Answer 1

im not sure if im understading this correctly but you can pass the variable from one page to another using GET variables, or in other words, using the query string in the URL.

So, in index.php you will have links like this:

<a href="product.php?p=1">Product 1</a>

In the second page (product.php) you can get this variable using this code:

$product_id = $_GET['p'];

And then query your database like this:

$query  = "SELECT * FROM products WHERE id = '" . $product_id . "'";
$result = mysql_query($query);

Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_get.asp

Note: Be careful with the way you query your database, the previous code is only a demonstration of how to retrieve the info, but is not a secure solution. I recommend you to check PDO (http://php.net/manual/es/book.pdo.php).