I'm working on the form and it has check boxes with different categories, let's say the categories were which sports you liked?
Rugby
Football
Tennis
Cricket
Volleyball

For example.

I want, for each one to be ticked, it to be added to a category colum in a database. This would allow for searching, IE:
search.php?sport=football

Would find the people who ticked football, but not only football.

I don't know the best way of doing it?

Does anyone understand what I mean?

Yes, PHP has a way of allowing for arbitrary numbers of checkbox.



By naming your inputs this way, PHP will build all the selected checkboxes into an array that you can access via $_GET['sport'] or $_POST['sport']

This means that you would then be able to have the same thing on your search form to search for multiple sports at once.

Have I answered the right question?

I think so, but how would I go about Inserting them into a database in an easy to search way? I don't want a column for each category, do I? Or do I? lol.

Hmm.. I dont really understand your question, but you want the user to be able to tick many boxes.. Correct?

Can you not do this by something like (lets say the url is: 'index.php?sport=football,rugby'):

[php]

// assume there is multiple sports checked

$sports = $_GET['sport'];

$singleSports = explode(",", $sports);

//print the sports selected

print $singleSports[0];
print $singleSports[1];

[/php]

I'll say agina.. I dont really get yer question.. lol

Well, the best way would be create a table for sports with say two columns

SPORT_ID(primary key) sportName

You would then fill that up with the sports you want in there and each will get it's own primary key. You then add this primary key as a foreign key where you need it -- say in a user's table in a column, favouriteSports.

If you use the SPORT_ID key in your form say if football had the SPORT_ID of 1, your checkbox would be <input type="checkbox" name="sport[]" value="1" />. Then you can just search against the primary SPORT_ID key or foreign key in other tables to find things matching that sport.

So instead of having a column for each sport, have a table for each category and a row each each option. Correct use of primary and foreign keys in your databases will make searching like this very easy.

I hope that makes sense.

What's a foriegn key? Only ever heard of primary, know what that does!

Basically, I want to insert the categories the user ticks in the 'sign up' form into the database in a way that makes it easy to search for a specific category.

Hopefully that makes more sense. Thanks for the help so far

This post has been edited by jackfranklin: Apr 6 2008, 03:53 PM

Can you not just insert them as the sports name.. separated by ','s and then explode them out? I'm just thinking out loud here.. lol!

Sounds fine, but how to insert them with a comma sperating each one?

I really aint sure about this.. there might be a better way, just let one of the php gurus reply lol

Nope, that won't work.... Use array_merge:

Yeah, when I thought about it.. I realised this and was about to look for a function that would...Seems that's the one!

Thanks Jan!

A foreign key is a column in a table that references the primary key of another table. By maintaining this primary/foreign reference, you can cross-reference data and maintain integrity.

mySQL doesn't enforce foreign key usage and doesn't check redundancy but building databases in this manner is definitely the way to go.

Essentially, as soon as you start seeing data duplication in a table (like 3 users all liking football) you want to move that data into a new table and replace it in the original table with foreign key references.

It helps to keep database size down as well.

Thanks Luke, turns out I do know what foreign keys are, just not by that name!

Jan/marc - I'll try it later and get back to you. Thanks,

I personally wouldn't recommend this. Normalizing databases makes things very much easier to work with.