Question

I need something simple; I have page where a user clicks an author to see the books associated with that author. On my page displaying the list of books for the author, I want a simple HTML title saying: ‘The books for: AUTHORNAME’

I can get the page to display author ID but not the name. When the user clicks the link in the previous page of the author, it looks likes this:

<a href="viewauthorbooks.php?author_id=<?php echo $row['author_id']?>"><?php echo $row['authorname']?></a>

And then on the ‘viewauthorbooks.php?author_id=23’ I have declared this at the start:

$author_id = $_GET[‘author_id’];
$authorname = $_GET[‘authorname’];

And finally, ‘The books for: AUTHORNAME, where it says AUTHORNAME, I have this:

echo $authorname

(With PHP tags, buts its not letting me put them in!) And this doesnt show anything, however if I change it to author_id, it displays the correct author ID that has been clicked, but its not exactly user friendly!! Can anyone help me out!

Answer 1

You could pull the author_id from the query string as you did using $_GET but beware you will need to validate what is coming through by the query. I hope you can see that without validation how bad of a security hole this is.

I am at work at the moment, but this is a quick example that should give you what you need without sanitizing your query.

$id = intval($_GET['author_id']); 
// of course, perform more validation checks
// just don't assume its safe.
$sql = "SELECT authorname FROM authors_tb WHERE author_id=" . $id;
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
   echo "The books for: " . $row['authorname'];
 }

The reason why your approach wasn’t working was because you utilize the $_GET URL parameter passing for author_name where you weren’t supplying the parameters in the URL, just the author_id.