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PHP and MySQL – Adding data

There comes time when your website tends to transcend the boundaries of mere brochure type looks. There is a need to interact, to seem dynamic, and to respond according to your visitor’s behavior. You also want your visitors to go through a list of offerings that run into hundreds. Creating hundreds of web pages having a uniform layout for hundreds of products can become an overwhelming task. Besides, it’s not easy to browse so many products sequentially — you need a mechanism to conduct searches or create sorted indexes.

A saintly combination of PHP and MySQL can come to your rescue. Once you have created a database with a well-defined structure, you can enter records and use those records as refence.

Here you can learn how to create an SQL database and its tables.

Once you have a database ready, you need a form to accept data, and then a php file to put that data into the MySQL table.

First the form. Assume we have a file with an online form named form.html. Here’s the form of the file:

<form name=”toSave” method=”post”

action=”save_it.php”>

<input type=”text” name=”name” size=”20″ /><br> <input type=”text” name=”email” size=”20″ /><br> <input type=”text” name=”city” size=”20″ /><br> </form>

Once we have this form ready, we need to create the php file it calls, namely, save_it.php. Suppose the name of the database is “visitors” and the table in this database is “visinfo” with fields “name”, “email”

and “city”.

<?php

$db=mysql_connect(“localhost”, “usrnm”, “pswd”) or die(“Could not connect to localhost.”); mysql_select_db(“visitors”, $db) or die(“Could not find visitors.”);

// The above lines establishes a connection with the // database. Keep localhost as is unless something different // is mentioned by your sql host. usrnm is user name and pswd is // password. What I want to say is, copy these lines as they are // and just replace the required fields and it should connect.

$querySQL = “insert into visinfo (d_name, d_email,

d_city) values ($name, $email, $city)”;

if(!$querySQL) error_message(sql_error());

// The above statement generates an error if you have setup the table in such a way that there should not be a duplicate entry.

?>

In my next article(s) I’ll show you how to query your database and then show the results on the web page.