How do I create a simple database search

Question

Either I'm being very stupid or all the manuals and books I'm
reading really are skirting round the obvious question of how do I
build a search page (using Dreamweaver 8) that searches a database
using only valid values previously fetched from the database. Can
anyone advise?
Example:
Say I've got a table called members which holds a list of
members of a gym. Say I want to offer my users a way of filtering
down the list of members by (say) home town and hair colour.
What I want to do is offer my users two lists which are
generated using Datasets: One listing all the unique hometowns of
my members and one listing unique hair colours. I want my users to
enter search criteia but only valid ones - so they must select from
the list of valid values I provide them with. I'll then filter my
main resulkts based on what they select.
But how do I do this? Not using URL variables obviously. And
not using Form variables as you can't list database items in a form
variable (can you?). I've got "DW 8: The Missing Manual" which I
was hoping would give me the answers I'm looking for but instead
seems to get very excited about the power of Dreamweaver 8 then
skirts round the fact that you can't use current database values to
do a database search!!! (unless I'm missing something that is)
While I'm at it - I'd idealy want to achieve all this on a
single page but I'm willing to concede on that if technology
predicts otherwise.
ASP.NET (VB)
Dreamweaver 8.0.2
Any guidance would be very welcome. (I'm new to all this by
the way)

Answer 1

> But how do I do this? Not using URL variables obviously.
Querystrings could be used if you wanted to. That'd be nice
so people could
bookmark the page.
> ASP.NET (VB)
Might be time to consider NOT using DW, as it no longer
supports ASP.net
But, in pseudo code:
onPageLoad:
- get list of hometowns
- populate hometown dropdown
- get list of hair colors
- populate hair color dropdown
onPostBack:
- check to see if there is a hometown selected
- check to see if there is a hair color selected
- if either of the above, modify the WHERE clause in your
SQL query to
reflect those values.
If you wanted to add querystrings, modify the logic as such:
onPageLoad:
- get list of hometowns
- populate hometowndropdown
- get list of hair colors
- populate hair color dropdown
- check for querystrings
- if they exist, grab them, modify the WHERE clause in your
SQL query to
reflect those values and show the results.
onPostBack:
- check to see if there is a hometown selected
- check to see if there is a hair color selected
- do a response.redirect to this page adding the appropriate
querystrings
if either of the above had values.
-Darrel