Advanced search with PHP and MySQL

This tutorial help to create advanced search functionality with PHP and Mysql. We’ll create a PHP form that takes input and search into the MySQL table.

Advanced search provides more options to the end user to filter the search result.

Steps to implement advanced search PHP mysqli

• Create a MySQL database and populate it with data
• Create a search form using PHP.
• Connect with the MySQL database.
• Add security to the MySQL query by putting mysqli_real_escape_string.

Create A Database and MySQL table

Let’s create a 'test' database in the MySQL server. Create an employee table in the MySQL database.

--
-- Database: `test`
--

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `employees`
--

CREATE TABLE `employees` (
  `id` bigint(20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  `name` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `age` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `salary` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `created_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  `updated_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

--
-- Dumping data for table `employees`
--

INSERT INTO `employees` (`id`, `name`, `age`, `salary`, `created_at`, `updated_at`) VALUES
(1, 'Tiger Nixon', 61, 320800, NULL, NULL),
(2, 'Garrett Winters', 63, 170750, NULL, NULL),
(3, 'Ashton Cox', 66, 86000, NULL, NULL),
(4, 'Cedric Kelly', 22, 433060, NULL, NULL),
(5, 'Airi Satou', 33, 162700, NULL, NULL),
(6, 'Brielle Williamson', 61, 372000, NULL, NULL),
(7, 'Herrod Chandler', 59, 137500, NULL, NULL),
(8, 'Rhona Davidson', 55, 327900, NULL, NULL),
(9, 'Colleen Hurst', 39, 205500, NULL, NULL),
(10, 'Sonya Frost', 23, 103600, NULL, NULL),
(11, 'Jena Gaines', 30, 90560, NULL, NULL),
(12, 'Quinn Flynn', 22, 342000, NULL, NULL),
(13, 'Charde Marshall', 36, 470600, NULL, NULL),
(14, 'Haley Kennedy', 43, 313500, NULL, NULL),
(15, 'Tatyana Fitzpatrick', 19, 385750, NULL, NULL),
(16, 'Michael Silva', 66, 198500, NULL, NULL),
(17, 'Paul Byrd', 64, 725000, NULL, NULL),
(18, 'Gloria Little', 59, 237500, NULL, NULL),
(19, 'Bradley Greer', 41, 132000, NULL, NULL),
(20, 'Dai Rios', 35, 217500, NULL, NULL);

--
-- Indexes for dumped tables
--

--
-- Indexes for table `employees`
--
ALTER TABLE `employees`
  ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`);

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for dumped tables
--

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for table `employees`
--
ALTER TABLE `employees`
  MODIFY `id` bigint(20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, AUTO_INCREMENT=58;
COMMIT;

HTML Form

We’ll create an HTML form to take inputs from the end user and submit form data. I have created the name, age, and salary inputs fields to get input from users.

<form class="advanced-search-form" method="post" action="index.php">
    <div class="form-group">
  <label for="">Employee Name</label>
  <input type="name" name="search[name]" value="<?php echo $name; ?>">
 </div>
 <div class="form-group">
  <label for="">Age</label>
  <input type="age" name="search[age]" value="<?php echo $age; ?>">
 </div>
 <div class="form-group">
  <label for="">Salary</label>
  <input type="salary" name="search[salary]" value="<?php echo $salary; ?>">
 </div>
 <div class="form-group">
  <input type="submit" value="Search">
 </div>
</form>

PHP code to submit data

Let’s create a PHP script that receives code from HTML form inputs and forms MySQL query with the advanced search condition. The code is:

$conn = mysqli_connect("localhost", "root", "", "test");
$queryCondition = " WHERE ";
if(!empty($_POST["search"])) {
foreach($_POST["search"] as $k=>$v){
 if(!empty($v)) {
     $v = mysqli_real_escape_string($v)
  if(!empty($queryCondition)) {
   $queryCondition .= " AND ";
  } else {
   $queryCondition .= " WHERE ";
  }
  
  $queryCondition .= $v ." like '%$v%'";
 }
}
$sql = "SELECT * FROM employees " . $queryCondition;
$result = mysqli_query($conn,$sql);