Help with Form

[laurenhouse]

I'm new to PHP and need some help with a drop down list.

 

I have a form on my page that generates a drop down list based on a table in my database. The purpose of this is so users can select their county, and the result will be the names and email addresses of who represents that county.(This is in another table in the db)

 

The drop down options are counties in my state, and the option value is the name of the county.

Here's what my code looks like (mysql connection is made in the header):

 

<form name="congressman" id="congressman" method="post" action="congress-result.php">

                <select name="cty" id="cty">

              <?php

  $query1 = "SELECT county FROM counties";

  $result = mysql_query($query1);

 

  if(!$result) die("Database access failed: " . mysql_error());

 

  while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))

  {

$county=$row['county'];

echo "<option value=". $county.">" . $county . "</option>";

}

?>

            </select>

            <input type="submit" value="Find Your Congressmen" />

            </form>

 

This generates the counties in a drop down nicely. When I click submit, I'd like the next page to generate the names and addresses based on the drop down selection. The query on the next page is ("SELECT * FROM representatives WHERE serves LIKE %(insert variable here, which I don't know what it should be, help!)%")

 

I'm having an extremely hard time trying to figure this out, so any help is much appreciated!! Thanks in advance!!!!!

[wildteen88]

To get the selected county from your drop down menu you'd use $_POST['cty']. Example

 

if(isset($_POST['cty']))
{
    $county = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['cty']);
    $query = "SELECT * FROM representatives WHERE serves LIKE %($county)%";
    $result = mysql_query($query);

    while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
    {
         // display results from query
    }
}

[laurenhouse]

Thank you, but I got an error message :

 

Warning: mysql_fetch_assoc(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/content/f/l/i/flipthebirds/html/congress-result.php on line 23