php and mysql search

[sdreams]

hello,

my website is mainly regarding vacation rentals of all kind in Spain. All accommodations are added manually and then shown in their respective province ordered alphabetically by town.

I would like to offer a search function to the visitors and hope it is ok to show a link to a page (see information in the center) I prepared in order to explain what I would like to set up:

http://www.spaindreams.com/eng/search.htm


I know that somehow this search could be done with php and mysql.
My web runs on Linux and PHP and Mysql are installed.

Help on this would be very much appreciated as I have been looking quite a lot for information, but....

Thanks for reading my message

[pipeten]

I'm not sure exactly how your tables are setup but the PHP && SQL below should give you some general idea ;)

if(!empty($_POST['type'])) {
 $where[] = "type='".mysql_escape_string($_POST['type'])."'";
}
if(!empty($_POST['region'])) {
 $elements[] = "region='".mysql_escape_string($_POST['type'])."'";
}
if(!empty($_POST['location'])) {
 $elements[] = "location='".mysql_escape_string($_POST['type'])."'";
}
WHERE
if(count($elements) >= 1) {
  foreach($elements as $key => $value) {
    $where .= $elements[$key]." && ";
  }
  $query = "SELECT data FROM property WHERE ".substr($where,0,-4).";";
}

hope that makes atleast a little sense ;)

[steve0]

Without knowing your table structures... An over-simplified way to do this would be
1. use simple names and values in your 'SELECT's
2. pass any the relevant variables to a query
3. run the query against your database.
4. have a "results page" display titles that link to the appropriate record.

e.g. SELECT *
FROM TblProperties
WHERE type='$TipoAlojamiento'
AND pool='$pool'
AND ac='$AC'
etc.. etc...

You can get more sophisticated by dynamically creating the query based on the variables, and using other operators like OR.

I hope this helps.

Steve

[pipeten]

if(!empty($_POST['type'])) { 
 $where[] = "type='".mysql_escape_string($_POST['type'])."'"; 
} 
if(!empty($_POST['region'])) { 
 $elements[] = "region='".mysql_escape_string($_POST['type'])."'"; 
} 
if(!empty($_POST['location'])) { 
 $elements[] = "location='".mysql_escape_string($_POST['type'])."'"; 
} 
if(count($elements) >= 1) { 
  foreach($elements as $key => $value) { 
    $where .= $elements[$key]." && "; 
  } 
  $query = "SELECT data FROM property WHERE ".substr($where,0,-4).";"; 
}

removed the random 'WHERE' ;) you could make this more lean by putting the if statements into a function i.e.

function where_build($fieldname) {
  if(!empty($_POST[$fieldname])) {
    $returnData = $fieldname."='".mysql_escape_string($_POST[$fieldname])."'";
  }
return $returnData;
}
unset($elements);
$elements[] = where_build('type');
$elements[] = where_build('location');
$elements[] = where_build('region');

if(count($elements) >= 1) {
  foreach($elements as $key => $value) {
    $where .= $elements[$key]." && ";
  }
  $query = "SELECT data FROM property WHERE ".substr($where,0,-4).";";
}

You could take it even further from their and allow where_build to take its data as an array but i'll shut up now :D

[sdreams]

thanks a lot for your information.

as i am new to all this i might look for somebody to set this up.
i haven´t created a mysql database nor anything else so far.