| Adding records to a MySQL database |
PHP and MySQL -- Adding data
There comes time when your website tends to transcend
the boundaries of mere brochure type looks. There is a
need to interact, to seem dynamic, and to respond
according to your visitor's behavior. You also want
your visitors to go through a list of offerings that
run into hundreds. Creating hundreds of web pages
having a uniform layout for hundreds of products can
become an overwhelming task. Besides, it's not easy to
browse so many products sequentially -- you need a
mechanism to conduct searches or create sorted
indexes.
A saintly combination of PHP and MySQL can come to
your rescue. Once you have created a database with a
well-defined structure, you can enter records and use
those records as refence.
Here you can learn how to create an SQL database and
its tables.
Once you have a database ready, you need a form to
accept data, and then a php file to put that data into
the MySQL table.
First the form. Assume we have a file with an online
form named form.html. Here's the form of the file:
<form name="toSave" method="post"
action="save_it.php">
<input type="text" name="name" size="20" /><br>
<input type="text" name="email" size="20" /><br>
<input type="text" name="city" size="20" /><br>
</form>
Once we have this form ready, we need to create the
php file it calls, namely, save_it.php. Suppose the
name of the database is "visitors" and the table in
this database is "visinfo" with fields "name", "email"
and "city".
<?php
$db=mysql_connect("localhost", "usrnm", "pswd") or
die("Could not connect to localhost.");
mysql_select_db("visitors", $db) or die("Could not
find visitors.");
// The above lines establishes a connection with the
// database. Keep localhost as is unless something
different
// is mentioned by your sql host. usrnm is user name
and pswd is
// password. What I want to say is, copy these lines
as they are
// and just replace the required fields and it should
connect.
$querySQL = "insert into visinfo (d_name, d_email,
d_city) values ($name, $email, $city)";
if(!$querySQL) error_message(sql_error());
// The above statement generates an error if you have
setup the table in such a way that there should not be
a duplicate entry.
?>
In my next article(s) I'll show you how to query your
database and then show the results on the web page.
==========================================================
Amrit Hallan is a freelance web developer. You can
checkout
his website at http://www.bytesworth.com.
For more such articles join BYTESWORTH REACHOUT at
http://www.bytesworth.com/br/default.asp or if you
have
a web dev related question then post it at
http://www.business180.com/index.php
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