Hi everyone.

I want to add a advanced search function to a demo site I'm doing but have no idea where to begin on this. I'm using a MySQL Db for all the site and PHP to pull data from DB.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Regards

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Advance search depends on your records to be searched.
so first make a list of fields and options which are there in your search result.

Since posting this message, I was surprised and pleased to find a freeware search engine that I got going fine that can search only only one column. Most people are not familiar with botanical names but would rather search by common names, so that is what I chose to set the search at. Now the website is much more user friendly toward the majority of people that are likely to visit it.

I have thought that I could add a drop down list of columns to pick from, such as
searching by botanical name, common names, location and so on. Having this as a variable that way would make it easy to adapt the present program to expand to allow choices of what kind of search can be done.

The same day I found this search engine, I also found another more versatile search engine that will search through all the fields that are listed during installation.
This is closer to being a site universal search engine. I have come close to getting it to work but not quite. It has a lot of "this ------>" type statements and I have never felt comfortable understanding what they all refer to. If I can get some help with this and get it working, that would be another large advancement in the development of the website. If someone would say they wouldn't mind helping, I would be glad to post the code for it.

I have seen many websites that seem to be able to search throughout the website, not just one field or one table. Getting this far has been a big change in the right direction. Being able to search in multiple MySQl tables without users having to choose which column would be the final and most comprehensive search that I would need to offer. If I got that second search engine going ok, I could experiment to
see if it could work with field names concatenated with table and field names. That might work.

I just relocated the address to the Design Place search engine:
http://www.designplace.org/scripts.php?page=1&c_id=25
This is the one that searches multiple columns. I include this address also since it could be a useful search engine for others, too.

I'll wait to see if anyone would care to help get past the errors I have had in trying to install this package :-) .

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