Re: Best Way

Quoting Don Smith who wrote on Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 08:56:19PM -0600: > I've searched the manual and read many examples, but I have to ask here for > the best way to program for a number of possibilities. I've got my site > working the hard way, but I'll bet there's a smarter way of doing the > following: > > Visitors to my site can search my database by lastname and/or firstname > and/or company. Is there a succinct way to checking for all possible > combinations? I alreay have NONE SELECTED covered, but the rest of the > possibilities are spotty. Too many IF statements, youknowwhaddimeanverne? > > SO... the user might just enter the last name, or just the first name, or > just the first and last, or just the company or just the last name and the > company.. and, oh well, you get the idea. Am I stuck with an awful lot of IF > statements or is there a smarter way of handling this? The site is > CameraCrews.com. Select "-by Name" to see the input page. The smart way: building the query string on the fly. Something like: $query="SELECT first,last,company FROM crews WHERE valid=1 "; if ($q_firstname){ $query.="AND firstname like %$q_firstname% "; } if ($q_lastname){ $query.="AND lastname like %$q_lastname% "; } if ($q_company){ $query.="AND company like %$q_company% "; } $query.="ORDER BY entrydate"; $result=sybase_query($query); Your query is a string too, use that fact :) Koos -- Koos van den Hout, PGP keyid RSA/1024 0xCA845CB5 via keyservers koos@kzdoos.xs4all.nl or DSS/1024 0xF0D7C263 -?) Fax +31-30-2817051 Visit my site about books with reviews /\\ http://idefix.net/~koos/ http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ _\_V