Understanding Search Interfaces

Search interfaces allow you to use form input as search criteria on an action page to limit what's retrieved from a database and displayed to the user.

The form and action pages that you build for search interfaces usually include the following code:

Dynamically populated form controls so that users can select existing database information as search criteria.

For example, the form that you're building dynamically populates a dropdown select box with data retreived from the Departments table.

Refer to Chapter 7, Using Forms and Action Pages to learn how to dynamically populate form controls.

Dynamically generated SQL statements so that user input on the form will be used by the SELECT statement on the action page.

For example, the action page that you will build in this chapter will refer to user input to filter what is returned to the page during the query.