Question

is it possible for a mysql statement to select any field from any table ?
for example :
SELECT * FROM * WHERE ? IN (SELECT * FROM *) to implement a generic search method which doesn’t depends on a specific table or field. i’ve just read that we can list all tables of a database with a, SQL command : SHOW TABLES
Do you have any idea about how can we do this ?
Thank you 🙂

Answer 1

You could try something like this in php

$getTables = mysql_query("show tables");
$tmpString = '';
while ($table_data = mysql_fetch_row($getTables))
{
    $tmpString.=$table_data[0].',';
}   
$ALL_DATABASE_TABLES = substr($string,0,strlen($tmpString)-1); //Remove the last ,

Then you got all your tables and you can build your query

like this

$qry = "SELECT * FROM $ALL_DATABASE_TABLES"