displaying single rows of data

[newmand2]

can anyone give me some pointers as to how to create a display page? I have a large DB of bands and wish to generate each page one row at a time. I know how to connect to the db etc, just how to display each individual data. Would the URL be www.mysite.com/bands.php?bandname="bandname"...?


THaanks

[mordred]

Probably.

You need to pass an unique value to the detail-display page, so you can identify the row of your DB table which data should be retrieved and displayed. The bandname could be such a value, but generally it's quite possible that two bands share the same name. Better it is to assign a numerical primary key to each row, call this field "ID", and pass that to the display page.

Alltogether the URL would look like

bands.php?id=321

On the display page, you grab the id value from the $_GET array, validate it that it really contains only a numerical value (intval() helps here), and use that value in your query. The query might look like

$query = "SELECT
	name,
	genre,
	band_picture_url
FROM
	bands
WHERE
	id = " . stripslashes($id);

Does that help? If not, try to give more details on what was unclear.

[Celtboy]

above mordred's code, add the following:

$id = $_GET["id"]; 

some complete code:

<?php

/* Database Connection Info */
$db_name      = "db_bands";
$sql_port     = "3306";
$sql_server   = "www.mysite.com";
$sql_user     = "sql_user";
$sql_password =  "password";
$band_table   = "tbl_bands";


$id = $_GET["id"];


/* Establish the connection to the database */
$connection   = mysql_connect($sql_server . ":" . $sql_port, $sql_user, $sql_password);
$db           = mysql_select_db($db_name) or die ("Unable to select database.");

/* Query the database, return the fields, and print information */
$query  = "SELECT * FROM '$band_table' WHERE band_id = '$id'";
$result = mysql_query($query,$db) or die ('Queryproblem: ' . mysql_error());
if ($result) {
    $row=mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
    print "Artist Name: " . $row["band_name"] . "<br/>";
    print "Artist Genre: " . $row["band_genre"] . "<br/>";

} else {
   print "Sorry...that band does not appear to be in our database.";
}
?>

Now obviously, I don't know your database connection information, nor do I know what information you're storing in the database (like genre, album titles, etc), nor do I know what those fields are called, but the above should give you a fairly good idea of what you can use.

HTH,
-Celt

[newmand2]

Thanks to both of you! Thats real helpful!