Search functions not working
I have a website that has both front and back end pages. I am having numerous problems with the search functions for both. I have 4 tables in my database. locations, category, users, jobs.
I have had a friend help me with inner joins on the jobs tables so i am able to display category name and location name instead of their id's. I am not sure if this is what caused it but now on the back end the search displays all the results all the time. The front end will allow me to search using the job id, but nothing else. When i try and use the cat name or loc name it tells me "Column 'cat_id' in where clause is ambiguous". I have been working on this problem for quite a few days and have got turned around pretty well.
I also have some other questions about adding things like "Any or All" options to drop down lists to allow to search for everything without having to narrow the terms down.
I am pretty new to PHP as well as what all the variables being thrown around are like $_Get and $_Post. So if there is any good document that can help me understand how all of this works and interacts that would be awesome too.