Using checkboxes for searching / filtering & uploading multiple files at once

It is possible to create your own search functionality, this can be done in a custom plugin template. But it you want to use more than one term in your search, you’ll need to do more coding.

No, uploading multiple files in one field is not possible.

Dear xnau,

So i went and started off with enabling/creating check box searching. Though, the problem is that i have absolutely no clue how to do it, but i guess it involves this line of code: $this->column_selector(false, true, false, 'column');. I made a custom template based on the search-default.

Could you give some pointers to help this absolutely nitwit person-> being me;) By the way, i also donated some money for your tremendous help and support, did you receive it?

Thanks in advance!

Nicolas

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for the donation…I can give you a few hints on how to do this, but what you really need to do is understand how HTML forms work. Once you have that, you’ll see it’s pretty easy to modify the form and still have it work.

Basically the form is supplying a set of named values. The dropdown you are talking about is for selecting the field to search on. If you look at the HTML of the search form you’ll see it has a name…that is the name of the piece of information it provides the script when it’s submitted. The selected item in the dropdown is the value attached to that name. So, if you want to get rid of the dropdown selector, you can replace it with a hidden input field of the same name, with the value set to the field you want them to search on. That way the information is still included in the set of data that is submitted to the script, even though the dropdown control is now gone.

In the template, the rest of the form is supplied by the PHP function <?php $this->search_form() ?> If you look at the form HTML, you’ll see that the result of that function is this:

<input class="search-item" type="hidden" value="LIKE" name="operator">
<input id="participant_search_term" class="search-item" type="text" value="" name="value">
<input type="submit" value="Search" name="submit_button">
<input type="submit" value="Clear" name="submit_button">

You can replace that function call in the template with the HTML it generates, and you’ll end up with the same thing, only editable.

Now, to make a value selector, you need to identify the text input in the HTML where the user types in their search. What you need to do is replace that (and only that) with a checkbox selector of the same name that has all the values you want them to be able to choose.

That’s really all there is to it, you just need to make sure the form is submitting all the fields needed by the script to generate the search result.

Thank you for your reply! But once again im getting a bit stuck.

So the part of removing dropdown selector goes perfectly.

I removed the $this->column_selector(false, true, false, 'column'); and replaced it with <input type="hidden" id="search_field_select" name="search_field[]" class="search-item" value="none">

I set the value to none because i just don’t want to use the selector, the checkboxes should do the selecting for the end user.

Secondly i also removed the <?php $this->search_form() ?> and replaced it with the plain html:

<input class="search-item" type="hidden" value="LIKE" name="operator">
<input id="participant_search_term" class="search-item" type="checkbox" value="" name="Name">Option 1<br>
<input type="submit" value="Search" name="submit_button">
<input type="submit" value="Clear" name="submit_button">

For better understanding purpose: I have (for testing) 4 database fields (don’t mind their names, its just for testing) with some data in it:
1. Name
2. Lastname
3. City
4. Country

So i went to test this piece of code but it doesn’t seem to work yet.
I first try’d to filter the options just with one checkbox (for testing). Though, when i check the checkbox it returns to me: Please type in something to search for.

So, i messed around a bit and changed the name back to value and also try’d a couple things in the value=. Though nothing seemed to work.
The next thing i did was setting the selector value (which i had set to none) to a database field: so i changed the value from ‘none’ to ‘name’. In the checkbox / search html i set the value to ‘Barry’ (a name i stored earlier in the database field name) and the name back to ‘value’. Suddenly i had a filter (results) for the database field Name!

Now, while that worked i try’d to add filters for the other stored names as well in the Name database field. So i try’d to add the same checkbox input but now with an different value, namely the second stored name. This sadly didn’t work and both the options only returned the last given name value.
Besides that i also try’d to create a filter for not only the database field ‘Name’ but also for the others (lastname, city, country). I did this by adding more hidden inputs but with the values of the other database fields. Though this also dint work.

So the question is:
1. How to add multiple filter options (database fields)
2. How to have the checkbox search for the multiple values in those database fields. (Think this requires 2 ‘search forms’ with the right checkboxes where search form 1 has checkboxes with values that look in database field 1 (Name for example) while searchform 2 has checkboxes with values that look in database field 2 (Lastname for example).

I am truly sorry that you need to over-explain this to me and i hope you are not giving up on me just yet;) Just a small note: It is a bit harder for me to understand the explanation immediately as English is not my native language (as you probably noticed). \

Thanks in advance!

Ah, now I’m beginning to understand what you’re trying to do.

And I’m sorry to say you can’t do it, there is no way to reconstruct the plugin search form that will search on multiple fields. You can only search on one field at a time with this form. To search on multiple fields, you have to write a plugin that creates it’s own search form and can take your submitted data and construct a database search query and plug that in to the list query using a filter callback.

I’m working on a plugin for that, but I’m too busy to get it out any time soon.

Ah to bad! Thank you anyway xnau! Like you suggested, I am now busy to create my own (checkbox) form with an query to get the data. Once i have got it working, or when i have some related database questions of the participant database (like result formatting/putting it in the tables or something like that) i will come back to you on it in this post (if you don’t mind)!

By the way, could you give a rough estimate of when you think that plugin your working on is done? Is it around 1-3 months, 3-6 or a year or so?

Once again, thank you for the help!

Dear xnau,

As promised i would reply if i had found / created some kind of solution. While here it is (perhaps you could give some advice in what to do better on it tho).

Ill go over the code step by step:

1. I firstly created a new template based on the pdb-search (could be anything though since all the code inside it was cleared anyway).
2. I cleared all the code in this template and started created my own code (can still call the template though with a shortcode, in this example: [pdb_search template=new].)
3. I then started to create the form with the checkboxes, for testing purposes i created 3 checkboxes with a submit button for the searching. The code:

<form method="post">
<input type="checkbox" name="columns[]" value="1" /><label for="Authors">Authors</label><br />
<input type="checkbox" name="columns[]" value="2" /><label for="Research Source">Research Source</label><br />
<input type="checkbox" name="columns[]" value="3" /><label for="Research Title">Research Title</label><br />
<input type="submit" name="go" value="Submit"/>
</form>

4. Next i have set the column names with a respond to the submitted checkboxes. When no checkboxes are selected, or just at loading the page, i made sure that all the database information of the 3 columns is shown.
The code:

<?php
$all = false;
$column_names = array('1' => 'Authorss', '2' => 'Research_Source', '3' => 'Research_Title');
if(isset($_POST['columns'])){
    $column_entries = $_POST['columns'];
    $sql_columns = array();
    foreach($column_entries as $i) {
        if(array_key_exists($i, $column_names)) {
            $sql_columns[] = $column_names[$i];
        }
    }
} else {
    $all = true;
    $sql_columns[] = "authorss";
    $sql_columns[] = "research_source";
    $sql_columns[] = "research_title";

}

5. Next thing i did was making the connection to the WordPress database and the participant database table. This was however a bit different then usual php database querying and connection because of working in WordPress. The code:

global $wpdb;

$tmp = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT ".implode(",", $sql_columns)." FROM wp_participants_database");
?>

6. To complete the code i output the selected database information (based on the checkbox selection) and wrapped it in table cells. The code:

<style type="text/css">
  table{
    border-collapse: collapse;
    border: 1px solid black;
  }
  table td{
    border: 1px solid black;
  }
  table th{
    border: 1px solid black;
  }
</style>

<?php
echo "<table>
    <tr>";

foreach($column_names as $k => $v) {
    if($all || (is_array($column_entries) && in_array($k, $column_entries)))
        echo "<th>$v</th>";
}
echo "</tr>";

if(count($tmp)>0){
    for($i=0;$i<count($tmp);$i++){
        echo "<tr>";
            foreach($tmp[$i] as $key=>$value){
                echo "<td>" . $value . "</td>";
            }
            foreach($column_names as $k => $v) {
                if($all || (is_array($column_entries) && in_array($k, $column_entries))) {
                    echo "<th>".$row[$v]."</th>";
                }
            }
        echo "</tr>";
    }
}

echo '</table>';
?>

xnau, if you have any other suggestions to this code then i would be glad to hear it:) I hope this step by step explanation can also help others! *Small note: many thanks to Zeusarm on stackoverflow who helped me out with this code!

Sometimes, you just have to take matters into your own hands…looks good.

No promises on the new release, I’m in the middle of a major development project right now.