Need help with search & filter problem

Hi,

I have a search page which needs to search 5 fields so I've made 5 drop down menus. If I use "OR" - user can
only select one - using "AND" only works if a selection is made from all the menus. How do I handle the search so that if one or
more of the selections are not made that it will still bring back results for the other parameters? And that if a selection
is not made then the default will be that all the records in that field are searched?

I'm sure this is not difficult as I see it all the time on websites - but I just can't get my head around how best to handle this.

I also have another problem - in the SQL statement to make a recordset that shows results (SELECT id, name, company, etc. ) returns a pre-defined set of fields or (SELECT *) returns all fields - how can I get the results from a Multi-selection menu so that the user can bring up only the results they need? Something like (SELECT name_of_menu WHERE ...etc) - so is there some particular way that this should be defined?

Thank you in advance to anyone who can help me with this!

Hi. The way you could do it, would be to use $_post['value']; this is written in the top of the line, and the searchfield is a post-form. then e.i: dropdown 1 = "hello", dropdown 2 = "bye" dropdown 3 = ""... etc. then you tjek id the collected postdata is emty ore not like this:

then further down you write:



-pheifel

Thanks for your help Pheifel.

I managed to do it by using 'like' instead of '=' in the sql statement and putting '%' as the first value for each dropdown menu. This works really well.