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.

If you alter the search recordset you can get errors like this. The error is telling you that you have specified columns that exist in more than one table without specifying what table the column should be coming from. You will need to qualify the name of the column with the table name first:

table_name.column_name

DataAssist is designed to work with a single table. You can alter the code after the fact like this but you may not get the desired results. If you see all the results regardless it means that you are not triggering the DataAssist Search sever behavior. On your results page it looks like the trigger is set to $_GET['Search'] so if you don't see this in the URL when you are on the results page then it is not going to trigger the new search.