autocomplete shows all entries, Does not do any searching

Question

Please help me ... I\'m a newbie! Please tell me what to do.

processed.php

Answer 1

That autocomplete function is probably passing a few variables to your processed.php page.

Use var_dump($_GET) to see all the things you're being passed.

Inside one of those $_GET elements, you'll have the contents of the text box as they exist on the page. For the sake of demonstration, I'm going to use $_GET['text']. You'll need to find out which part holds the data you need.

What you'll need to do is search the database using this value for a list of results to return.

$sql="SELECT name FROM artist";
$artist = select($sql);

This is your script as it exists. What it may end up looking similar to is this.

$text_input = mysql_escape_string($_GET['text']);
$sql="SELECT name FROM artists WHERE name LIKE '%$text_input%'";
$artist = select($sql);

You'll want to get results that are similar to the inputted text on the user-facing page.

A few notes for you

1. I used mysql_escape_string() solely to may what you already have. While this does work (driving around a busted-ass chevy pacer works too, but there are much better ways though), its not recommended, which sets us up for point 2.

2. Using the old mysql extension is not really a good idea, its been replaced by mysqli, and PDO.

3. you'll need to escape your data, this is how its done with mysqli.

Answer 2

Autocomplete expects the source (when an URL is specified to filter out the results).

From documentation:

String: When a string is used, the Autocomplete plugin expects that string to point to a URL resource that will return JSON data. It can be on the same host or on a different one (must provide JSONP). The Autocomplete plugin does not filter the results, instead a query string is added with a term field, which the server-side script should use for filtering the results. For example, if the source option is set to "http://example.com" and the user types foo, a GET request would be made to http://example.com?term=foo. The data itself can be in the same format as the local data described above.

So in your PHP code you have to do:

include_once('../../dbConnect.inc.php');
$sql="SELECT name FROM artist WHERE `name` like '%".mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['term'])."%'";
$artist = select($sql);
$output_items = array();
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($artist)) {
    $results[] = array('label' => $row['name']);
}
echo json_encode($results);