Dropdowns And Selections

[SteveNI]

I hope someone can offer me some guidance

I am looking to populate a dropdown box with values from a database column

Then when the user selects one of the dropdown options it then runs a second query that will produce a results table.

I have my code to populate the dropdown

<?php
include ('connect-To-db.php');

$query = $mysqli->query("Select distinct`catagory` FROM `transactions` WHERE `Debit`!=0");

echo"<select name = 'catagory'>";

while ($row = $query->fetch_object()){
   echo "<option value= '".$row->catagory."'>".$row->catagory."</option>";
}
echo "</select>";

?>

 

And I also have my code that will query the database to produce the results I need

<?php

include ('connect-To-db.php');

 

if($query = $mysqli->query("Select `ThirdParty`,`Debit`,`Date` FROM `transactions` WHERE `Catagory` = 'shopping'")){

if($query->num_rows>0){

echo"<table border ='1' cellpadding='10'>";

echo "<tr><th>Payee</th><th>Amount</th><th>Date</th></tr>";

 

while($row=$query->fetch_object()){

echo "<tr>";

echo "<td>".$row->ThirdParty."</td>";

echo "<td>".$row->Debit."</td>";

echo "<td>".$row->Date."</td>";

echo "</tr>";

}

echo "</table>";

}

else{

echo 'No results to return';

}

}

else{

echo 'ERROR'.$mysqli->error;

}

 

?>[code]

 

What I dont quite understand is what I need to do to get the two pieces of code to run together. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[falkencreative]

Unless I'm misunderstanding you... I'd think you would want to split it into two pages:

 

-- On the first page, you'd have your generated dropdown menu within a form. The user would then select from the dropdown menu, and press the submit button, which would redirect them to a new page using the form's "action" value

 

-- On the second page, you'd retrieve the value from the dropdown by using $_POST, and display the results to the user.

 

Hope that helps get you started?

[SteveNI]

Unless I'm misunderstanding you... I'd think you would want to split it into two pages:

 

-- On the first page, you'd have your generated dropdown menu within a form. The user would then select from the dropdown menu, and press the submit button, which would redirect them to a new page using the form's "action" value

 

-- On the second page, you'd retrieve the value from the dropdown by using $_POST, and display the results to the user.

 

Hope that helps get you started?

Thanks Ben

 

I was hoping to refrain from making the user press a submit button, I was hoping that they could could simply select an option in the dropdown menu and this would in turn would run the necessary query to produce a table.

I am reading things about ajax and javascript onClick but to be honest I dont really understand what needs to be done.