Question

I have some drop down boxes that store counties and constituencies in them.

When you select an item from the drop down and click a search button, the value that is returned is the primary key id of the selected county or constituency.

<option value="<?php htmlout($county['ids']); ?>">
<option value="<?php htmlout($constituency['ids']); ?>">

These values are successfully returned as I can output them using:

    $countyid = $_GET['county'];
$constituencyid = $_GET['constituency'];

<?php echo $countyid ?>
<?php echo $constituencyid ?>

I then have an sql statement as follows:

    $sqlparams = array();

if($countyid !== '') {
    $sqlparams[] = "county = '$countyid'";
}
if($constituencyid !== '') {
    $sqlparams[] = "constituency = '$constituencyid'";
}

$sql = "SELECT * FROM pt";

if (count($sqlparams) > 0) {
    $sql .= " WHERE " . implode(" AND ", $sqlparams); 
}

This is then executed and the results stored in an array and all of this works.

However, the problem is that for instance with the following example:

if($countyid !== '') {
    $sqlparams[] = "county = '$countyid'";
}

I am comparing ‘county’ a VARCHAR column with ‘$countyid’ an integer.

I want to know the best way to get the name of the county in place of that $countyid variable if that makes sense so that I am comparing a VARCHAR with a VARCHAR.

I apologise if this is very simple but I am confused as to how to do this.

I understand that I could change the value of the dropdown to return the name but there is some stuff going on in the background that requires the id to be returned and I am pretty sure that it is good practice to return the id as this is very flexible.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Assuming a table Counties with columns name and countyid:

$sqlparams[] = "county IN (SELECT name FROM counties WHERE countyid = $countyid)"