Search/Filter

Beginners - Learning PHP
#1

Hi i hope someone can give me a good example of point me in the direction of where i need to start.
I’m creating a fairly basic Car Sales website, i have all the design in place and all Cars and details being pulled from database. I would like to create a Search whereby it displays firstly all Manufacturers in a drop down, then subject to manufacturer it can be filtered by model, then by min price > max price, year etc etc all of these details are loaded in the database and obviously i have worked out how to display the necessary details but i’m really stumped with searching and filtering … I am an absolute noob, so i am hoping someone could give me a simple mysqli example.

Greatly appreciated.

#2

It’s difficult to give an example without seeing the table design and data.

#3

Hey thanks for your reply, i’m not sure exactly what you need but i basically have a table with fields “make”,“model”,“price”,“year”, example Ford Mustang 27,000 1967 … What i want is a drop down with every “make” with the model field empty until a make is chosen at which point a model can be chosen or not, so a minimum search choice of make … with the option to choose a model and/or filter by price min / price maximum and year …
I hope i have given you enough information to atl east point me in the right direction, i sincerely appreciate any help.

Thanks

#4

SELECT DISTINCT make FROM table;

Ideally you would want to maintain a separate table that contains “makes” then link your “models” to a “make_id”

Do you know JavaScript or worked with AJAX before?

#5

Ah ok … unfortunately, maintaining a separate table isn’t really an option as the table is being loaded from a csv feed and i don’t really want a pre-populated table of makes as, the feed changes daily and i only want to show makes & models that actually exist, so i’m not sure how i would go about assigning the make_id.

With regards to Java & Ajax … i haven’t really worked much with them, but i assume that’s how the model field would be fetched without refreshing the page …

I wonder is there an existing script that could be modified.

#6

After reading around and learning a little bit of terminology … maybe i can expand a little bit more clearly on what i require … I don’t need the full search results to be updated with ajax, actually i think the only part which needs updated with ajax id the “model” field.

So SELECT DISTINCT make FROM table; will produce my first drop down of Vehicle Make.

Basically from there i need my second drop down to produce a list of “model” where the “make” is equal to drop down 1. This bit needs to be generated with ajax, but at that point a search button will produce the results in a new page.

Ideally prior to Searching i would like price min, price max & year filters as optional … but at this stage i would be happy just to have the “make” & model part working …

I don’t know if that makes any more sense, but appreciate any help.

Thanks

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