Question

So me and my colleague have been assigned for making a library database as the lesson’s assignement and then make an html database interface where someone would be able to perform certain tasks within the database such as inserting rows, deleting rows, finding rows etc.

We have created the database, imported it and all that but the problem is in inserting elements into it.

Well for example the books table has a many-to-many relationship with the authors table (where primary keys of each table are the ISBN and the authors ID respectively) so when we want to insert a book with it’s authors in our DB we don’t know exactly how to do it because they are in different tables. We are confused as to how we would put data from a single form in multiple tables with different primary keys.

We have been trying to find examples like that but to no avail.

Even links to tutorials and whatnot are mostly welcome.

Server side code is PHP.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

I have some suggestions for you,

1. use drop down box for subject names and populate it thru Subject table ,so you could only select subject name which are in the DB.

2. Upon entering the book details (all most all the values in the table and plus subject name),manually insert ISBN into Authors table.

3. On the book user interface also use dropdownbox for publisher name (as many people don’t remember publisher code) ,then on postback you might pivk value publisher code from value =”??”.
   <select>
<option value="Code1234">Sams Publisher</option>
</select>

4. If you add the Editor form of Author ,Publisher , Book and subject in the same page it would be too much fields for the user to enter and he might get confused ,but as it’s just a homework you can ignore this point and try your best to manage them on one page.

Sample Library DB:

Source: