Question

I’m finding it hard to get my head around the logic around this issue I’m having.

Currently, I have a search.html page that on submit goes to Results.php. There is then some code that searches the mysql for whatever was inputted into the search page.

Now, How would I go about having the search and the results on the same page? How would i return the variable from the search page? For example before I was using;

$search_term = $_POST['name'];

How would I get the ‘name’ variable if its on the same page?

EDIT: Second issue

I have the code working that many of you answered with, thank you very much! I’ve now come to my second problem. I have two inputs a textbox for the search query and then a dropdown box for a subject to search.

Then user then presses submit and the db is searched, this all works fine. I now want to create another dropdown box so the user can sort the provided results in a matter that they see fitting, for example price high to low etc.

I have the HTML code already done but as you can imagine, the second I press submit its reloading the page and as it doesn’t know what the user has previously searched it exits the php and acts as if its a fresh page load.

URL: http://helios.hud.ac.uk/u0862025/db/test.php

Play around with it, press submit to lift all products in the database.

Answer 1

You could just make the whole thing in one file. This is crude and totally incomplete, but something like this –

<?php
$results = array();
$term = "";

if(isset($_POST['name']))
{
    $term = $_POST['name'];
    $order_by = "";

    if(isset($_POST['order'])
    {
        switch($_POST['order'])
        {
            case "price-high-low":
                $order_by = "ORDER BY `price` DESC";
            break;
            case "name":
                $order_by = "ORDER BY `name` ASC";
            break;
            default:
                $order_by = "ORDER BY `id` DESC";
            break;
        }
    }

    $sql = "SELECT * FROM `your_table` WHERE `name` LIKE '%". sanitized($_POST['name']) ."%' $order_by";

    //run query and assign the results to a variable, like $results
}
?>
<form action="" method="post">
    <input type="text" name="name" value="<?php echo $term; ?>"><br>
    <?php if(!empty($results)): ?>
    <select name="order">
        <option value="price-high-low">Price: High to Low</option>
        <option value="name">Name</option>
    </select>
    <?php endif; ?>
    <input type="submit" value="submit">
</form>

<?php if(!empty($results)): ?>
Results for term: <?php echo $term; ?><br>
<?php foreach($results AS $res): ?>
    <?php echo $res['name']; ?><br>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Of course this is very crude and assumes many things. Like that your results are an array, for one. That your results have a key called name, etc.

But as you asked, this is all on one page and that’s the basic idea.

feel free to ask any questions and I may update as needed.

** UPDATE 1 **
I updated this example to consider a dropdown that only shows after a result is made. It will re-submit the form with an added order parameter. This example does not consider pagination and makes the assumption that you have a sanitize function that cleans the input. Obviously you should be using mysqli or PDO as they will both offer solutions for this. Do NOT rely on mysql_ functions like mysql_real_escape_string. All mysql_ is deprecated and should not be used anymore.