How to populate a dynamic table according to the choice of the viewer

Question

Hi there,
I ran into a dead-end on my  "Events" page.
There is a dynamic table getting the info from a database. It will initially show the Upcoming Events.
At this point my question is this:
*Can I populate the dynamic table based on a condition where the current date and the event date (as in the db) will be compared and if the event date is later than the current date, it will be displayed in the table. Otherwise, it won't.
If I can do that, can someone please help me out with the code?
Besides that, on the right side of the page there are 3 options for the viewer:
1. View upcoming events
2. View past events
3. Search events by month and year
What I want to do is that when the viewer clicks on 'past events', the table will be reset and populated with those events whose date has passed.
When the viewer clicks on "upcoming events", the table is reset again and populated with the relevant events.
When the viewer selects a month and a year, search the database to find the relevant records.
Can all of this be written in php? Since I read smwhere that php doesn't work with onclick functions... i got confused. Cuz the data in my table will have to vary depending on what the viewer is clicking (upcoming events/past events/search events). I do not wish to create separate pages for each type of event.
If anybody has a better suggestion to carry out this task, please share!
Thanks!

Answer 1

>Can I populate the dynamic table based on a condition where the current date and the event date (as in the db)
>will be compared and if the event date is later than the current date, it will be displayed in the table. Otherwise, it won't.
Of course. You just need to compare the date field in your database with the current date as returned by your DBMS date function. Assuming you are using MySQL, you would compare your column with the currdate() function and use the appropriate greater than/ less than operators in the SQL WHERE clause. If you don't know what a WHERE clause is then I would urge you to learn SQL as soon as possible. You can't build data driven sites without a basic understanding of SQL.
>Since I read smwhere that php doesn't work with onclick functions..
What this means is that php is a server side language, where user interactions always occur at the client site. But that does not mean you can't invoke a server side action from a client side event. You most certainly can and would.
You might consider adding links to the dynamic table page that pass a querystring to the php script which determine what filter to add in the WHERE clause- greater than the current date, less than, etc.
Also, in the future, please post these questions to the application development forum.