perform mysql select statement when a dropdown menu item is selected - php

Question

I am developing a web application and i am stuck with a problem.
i have two drop-down list, one is dynamically populated from my db, while the the other is static html.
When a user selects an item form the dynamic drop-down and select an item from the static html drop-down, and clicks submit on the form, I would like the dynamic selected list item to print out the entire selected row in the db.
here is my code sample
if ($contactc =="Yes"){
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM company_details where comid = '$selectsector'");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo $row["fname"]." ".$row["comname"]."<br/>";
}
}

Answer 1

maybe this is what you wanted, though you will have to use JQuery
HTML
<form id="when_user_clicks_submit_button">
<input class="data_to_send" type="text" value="MySQL Selection data"></input>
<input type="submit" value="Submit"></input>
</form>
JavaScript|JQuery for Ajax Request:
document.getElementById('when_user_clicks_submit_button').onsubmit = function() {
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "php_code_script.php",//php script location
data: { "data_from_form": data_to_send }, //data to send in JSON format
success: function(data) { //callback if the script execution is successful
$('<p>' + data + '</p>').appendTo('body');//this returns the selected information from the MySQL database and inserts it somewhere, make sure to echo or print the selected data inside the php script.
}
)}
};
PHP
if($_POST['data_from_form']) {
if ($contactc =="Yes"){
$selectsector = $_POST['data_from_form']; //gets the sended data from the form page to use for selection in the MySQL database
$result = mysqli_query("SELECT * FROM company_details where comid = '$selectsector'");
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){
echo $row["fname"]." ".$row["comname"]."<br/>";
}
}
}
Maybe this is sort of what you wanted, you basically send the information you want to use to select from the database, the php script then handles it and echoes the selected information from the database, that data then returns to the form page where it becomes the value pf an DOM Element(HTML tag). This is just to give an example of what you maybe want, I didn't think about security or anything(I don't know much about it yet). Note I also changed the mysql to mysqli to make it more compatible with newer versions of PHP because mysql is no longer supported in newer versions or for the future.