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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T21:51:53+00:00

I’ve searched this relentlessly and I cannot find an answer to my quandary –

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I’ve searched this relentlessly and I cannot find an answer to my quandary – I think the problem is that I’m not exactly sure WHAT to search for! Anyhow, my problem is this…

Scenario:
Imagine having a database of, for arguments sake, recipes and you wanted to give users the ability to generate a list of recipe suggestions based on various criteria.

In the form of a web page, I would want this to be a series of drop down boxes on the left. The user would select their filter options from the drop down boxes and, after pressing the submit button, would be presented with a list of recipes that fit the criteria.

So they could, for example select ‘Meal Type’, ‘Calories’, ‘Cooking Time’ and then (after hitting submit) get back a list of recipe suggestions that fit the bill.

(Ideally they would appear without the need for reloading the page and would be contained within a slider to browse through, but I can probably crack that part if I get the underlying part sorted…)

Requirement:
I just need to know – at a top level – which technologies I would use to achieve this (and the process of how they work together).

I’m guessing I’d need a MySQL dB with recipes that are tagged with criteria, then use the form and php to pull from the database. Is this correct?!

Seems like such a common requirement, but I can find no good reading on how to achieve this..

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Take a look at the PHP guide to prepared statements. You’ll be basically writing a select statement against the table where your data resides, with the where clause of the select statement being the parameters selected by your user in the form.

    PHP Prepared Statements

    The reason you want to stick to prepared statements is that they are generally more secure against attacks on your site via the form, using SQL injection.

    For the end to end solution, your front end will submit to a PHP page which will then handle the criteria specified by the user, translating those into the prepared statement which will find the data from your table. The table itself will need to have columns which correspond to the criteria. That gets more into database design which is a much larger topic to cover here, however there are plenty of guides out there for that.

    Really you want to break the solution down into the subcomponents, then find various guides out there to tackle the parts. Good luck, hope this helps. 🙂

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