Filtering Feature for Website

[eagerchimp]

Hello all!

What I’m looking to achieve is really basic, but I found most of the explanations online too sophisticated or vague. In other words, they’re all intended for seasoned web developers.

What I need is a filtering mechanism for my website. Suppose I’m setting up a site listing medical experts across a country. There are hundreds of database (MS SQL Server) records of people and each of them has multiple attributes. So I need to add a filter facility to filter the profiles by those attributes, so users can easily search for just the person they need by narrowing down their search results. It's just like the filtering feature on any online store out there, so it must be really simple, but still I haven't been able to dig up anything meaningful for my level of understanding.

How do I do it? What would be the easiest way for a novice web developer to pull that off? Any hints would be appreciated. Thank you!

[justsomeguy]

It's certainly simple for a seasoned developer, that's a basic part of using databases.  If you don't know how to use databases then it's not going to be easy though.  You need a form for people to submit whatever you want them to submit, and your code that processes the form needs to build a query with the appropriate WHERE clauses for your database structure.  e.g.:

SELECT * FROM people WHERE facility = 3 AND specialty = 10