Deleting Database Records With a checkbox? - php

Question

I just finished my news posting system and I need help to make the news deletion system.
Right now I have this code to load the each post ID and TITLE into a table as well as a checkbox beside it.
<?php
$news = mysql_query('SELECT `id`,`title` FROM news');
if (!$news)
{
exit('<p>Error retrieving news from database!<br />'.
'Error: '.mysql_error().'</p>');
}
while ($new = mysql_fetch_array($news))
{
$id = $new['id'];
$title = $new['title'];
echo "<tr style='background: #3D3D3d; width: 400px; font-family: Century Gothic; font-size: 15px;'>";
echo "<td style='padding-left: 5px'><input type='checkbox' name='id' value='$id' /></td> <td style='padding-left: 15px'>$id</td> <td style='padding-left: 15px'>$title</td>";
echo "</tr>";
}
?>
I want to know how to delete each database record by id using checkboxes.

Answer 1

First i would recommend an Archive system over Deleting just so that the data is stored for any reason you would have to call on it, no matter how little importance the entry has.
an idea would be to break up the code so that it makes it easy to read:
All styles into a CSS file or CSS script takes and use classes and
IDs to set up style (its a bit hard to read your code)
Have SQL procedures call to manage the SQL data to make your code
able to change from PHP to something else if you ever need to
to add my idea to the code
<?php //deletenews.php
//....
$result = $mysql_query("Call Delete_news_Entry($id)");
if (!$result)
{
die("Error deleting record from news" . mysql_error);
}
//.... end of php
?>
SQL Procedure
DELIMITER $$
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS $$
CREATE PROCEDURE DB.Delete_news_entry(in_ID INTEGER)
BEGIN
DELETE FROM news WHERE id=in_ID;
END $$
DELIMITER ;
(if you want it to be live over submit button)
javascript
<Script type='text/javascript'>
//depends on jquery
function deletenews(id)
{
var spanid = "#span"+id;
$.get("deletenews.php",
null,
function(){
Alert("Complete") //this is more or less for you to put your required code here
$(spanid).hide();
},
"html")
.error(function(){
Alert("error") // for your own code to go here
});
}
</script>
sorry, just modifying your code
//in your php code, for the event, try onclick or onchange to trigger the delete
echo "<span id='span$id'><td class='left'><input type='checkbox' name='id' value='$id' onclick='deletenews($id)' /></td><td class='left'>$id</td> <td class='left'>$title</td></span>";
Having everything a part makes it easy to read.
i have been practicing breaking my code up for a long time now, i even draw maps of how all my files relate instead of having a page of php 1000 lines of code or more.

Answer 2

Right now it seems that you're only creating the table rows, but I'm gonna go ahead and assume these are within in the table element. If this table is also within a form element, you can delete all the records with a checked checkbox on submit.
You need to use the PHP isset function in the form's action reference to check if the checkbox is set and a foreach loop to run through them all. Something like this:
<?php
foreach($_POST as $key =>$value){
if(isset($_POST[$key])){
$value = mysql_real_escape_string($value);
mysql_query("DELETE FROM table WHERE id = $value");
}
}
?>