Adding records to a MySQL database using PHPby: Amrit HallanFull Version Article published Monday, 23rd February 2004 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. Related Stories: » Protecting your PHP and HTML Source Code » Publishing Newsletters Using PHP & MySQL - 4 » Publishing Newsletters Using PHP & MySQL - 3 » Publishing Newsletter Using PHP & MySQL - 2 » Publishing Newsletters Using PHP & MySQL » Unix Webserver Crontab Basics |