Here’s a basic demo of what I’m talking about. If you populate the form and press “Submit” you’ll notice the table updates without the entire page refreshing.

Demo

Ajax JQuery / PHP – Refresh Table Demo.

I’ve put a limit of 20 entries on the demo version, to save myself from being abused!!

Download

Download Ajax JQuery / PHP – Refresh Table

Please note, I have merely provided a guide. You are strongly advised to implement your own server and client side error checking.

I hope you find the code useful

So, let’s say we have a form like this on index.php:

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<form action="insert.php" method="POST">
<fieldset>
<legend>Details<legend>
<div>
<label>First Name:</label>
</div>
<div>
<input type="input" name="first_name" value="Bright" disabled="disabled" />
</div>
<div>
<label>Surname:</label>
</div>
<div>
<input type="input" name="surname" value="Cherry" disabled="disabled" />
</div>
<div>
<label>Email:</label>
</div>
<div>
<input type="input" name="email" value="design@brightcherry.co.uk" disabled="disabled" />
</div>
<div style="margin-top:10px;">
<input disabled="disabled" type="submit" value="Submit" />
</div>
</fieldset>
</form>

The form’s action is insert.php, so whichever method you choose (GET/POST) will get passed to insert.php. Now, before you INSERT the data into a MySQL table, you should ensure the data is safe to INSERT.

The PHP function you should use is mysql_real_escape_string.

You can do the following before inserting the data (assuming the method type is POST):

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$_POST['first_name'] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['first_name']);
$_POST['surname'] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['surname']);
$_POST['email'] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['email']);

But that’s not a very efficient method because you’re repeating the same function over and over, and if the form you’re using has a lot more fields, it will quickly become very problematic for a number of reasons.

Here’s a better and more efficient way of cleaning the data:

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foreach(array_keys($_POST) as $key)
{
  $clean[$key] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST[$key]);
}

So what’s happening now is that ALL the POST variables are being cleaned in the foreach loop. You’re also renaming the POST values to $clean, but keeping the actual key value the same – so to echo the values you simply do this:

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echo $clean['first_name'];
echo $clean['surname'];
echo $clean['email'];

It’s as easy as that

Table Structure

This table is called Postcode_tbl:

INSERT SELECT Query Example

Let’s assume we have a table with the exact same structure as Postcode_tbl, but it’s called Postcode_tbl_2, and we want to copy all the rows from Postcode_tbl into Postcode_tbl_2 where the first 2 characters of the postcode is “CM”.

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INSERT INTO
Postcode_tbl_2
(
postcode,
longitude,
latitude
)
SELECT
postcode,
longitude,
latitude
FROM
Postcode_tbl
WHERE
postcode LIKE 'CM%'

Now, the table structure DOESN’T need to be the same in order to use a INSERT SELECT query. I just used the same structure for ease. If the table structure differs, or the field names don’t match, just make sure you specify the correct field names and order of fields in your query.

Example 1: Removing rows with a specific duplicate field:

As you can see, the field “postcode” has duplicated rows.

STEP 1: Copy table structure

I used the following code to duplicate the table structure of `postcodes` (if you use PhpMyAdmin, you can use the shortcuts):

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CREATE TABLE `DB_NAME`.`postcodes2` (
`postcodenospace` varchar( 10 ) NOT NULL ,
`longitude` varchar( 15 ) NOT NULL ,
`latitude` varchar( 15 ) NOT NULL
)

STEP 2: run query:

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INSERT INTO
postcodes2
(
postcode,
longitude,
latitude
)
SELECT postcode,longitude,latitude
FROM `postcodes` 
GROUP BY postcode

That’s it. All the rows with a unique postcode will get inserted into the table “postcodes2″.

The result

The key is in the SELECT query, where the postcode field is grouped together. That effectively puts all the duplicate postcodes together, generating a result of rows with unique postcodes.

Example 2: Removing duplicate rows:

STEP 1: Copy table structure

Use the code above to copy the table structure.

This example is slightly different, look at the data:

The previous example simply filtered the data by duplicate postcodes. As you can see, the highlighted row has different longitude and latitude values. So if you want to filter the data by unique rows, you need the following query:

STEP 2: Run the query

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INSERT INTO
postcodes2
(
postcode,
longitude,
latitude
)
SELECT postcode,longitude,latitude
FROM `postcodes` 
GROUP BY concat(postcode,longitude,latitude)

The result

Again, the key is the SELECT query. This time the query groups all the fields together (using the CONCAT function), to return rows with completely unique values.

Redirect An Entire Directory / Folder with Htaccess

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RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^old_dir/(.*) http://www.example.com/new_dir/ [R=301,L]

The nice thing about this code is that regardless of how deep you go into old_dir, it will always redirect. So literally the entire directory is redirected.