Question

I have read tutorials about how to populate an entire Drop down list with MySQL, but the problem I am running into is that I only want to grab the one from the database and have that be the selected one. So I would have like a drop down with three items (Item1, Item2, Item3) in the database its stored in a column called itemschoice which has a value of ‘Item2’. How do I go about getting item2 to be selected when I load the drop down box?

Answer 1

In your <option> element add the selected attribute for the value that is in itemschoice.

Crude example using a made up function to get the choice:

$choice = get_items_choice();
$results = mysqli_query($sql);

echo '<select name="whatever">';
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($results)) {
    if ($row['choice'] === $choice) {
        echo '<option value="' . $choice . '" selected="selected" />';
    } else {
        echo '<option value="' . $choice . '" />';
    }
}
echo '</select>';

This is just an example, don’t copy & paste this without adding some kind of error verification!