Processing Data using Web Form - php

Question

I have a database that stores data input from a website. I have designed a form to retrieve some of the data from the database. My issue is, I want some of the form fileds to auto populate with data from certain table columns. i don't know the PHP code to insert into the form fileds to do this.
The form looks like this:
http://onlinestudentsadmission.com/schooldemo/studentsdataform.php
The table has the following columns:
userid last_name first_name year friendly_url has_pic Gender Orphan Admmission School County
I want the form to pull the data in year, County, and School columns and populate the field options. What code do I insert into those form fields?
The form submits to studentdatadisplay.php which am yet to code since I dont know how it should look like so as to get the data from the data retrieval form and format it to a table depending on the search criteria.
Any help will be appreciated alot.

Answer 1

If your HTML form inputs have the name attributes set, and your form action is actually posting to the right URL, you don't have to do anything else to your form.
Have a read through this guide for PHP form handling. Basically, the name attributes for each of your inputs will be an element in the $_POST object available to your in your future studentdatadisplay.php script. You'll do any database queries in that script file.

Answer 2

Are you talking about drop-down list that is automatically populated with the different values from a column (such as year, County or School)?
If so, the PHP at the top of your page should look something like this:
<?php
$con=mysqli_connect("localhost","username","password","myDatabase");
if (mysqli_connect_errno())
{
echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
}
$lookupYear = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT DISTINCT year AS value FROM tblStudents ORDER BY year ASC");
$lookupCounty = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT DISTINCT County AS value FROM tblStudents ORDER BY year ASC");
$lookupSchool = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT DISTINCT School AS value FROM tblStudents ORDER BY year ASC");
?>
Then when you're ready to list each one in the body HTML of your page, generate a dropdown option for each one using this example:
<select name="year">
<?php
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($lookupYear))
{
echo "<option value=\"" . $row['value'] . "\">" . $row['value'] . "</option>";
echo "\n";
}
?>
</select>
I hope that helps.