title: Populate a PHP Dropdown List from MySQL Database in Joomla
body: <p>I am a very inexpert php programmer, I ve done some asp.net programming but never php. </p>
  
  <p>I need the requirement to add a dropdownlist with values from a table in the mysql database. I manually created a table  training:
  id
  training
  date
  hour
  openseats</p>
  
  <p>And I need to display this dates and hour in the dropdownlist, so once the user clikc submits this get stored into a table called 
  jos_jquarks_users_acknowledge</p>
  
  <p>Can you help me how to pupulate the dropdown?</p>
  
  <p>Code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{source}
  &lt;!-- You can place html anywhere within the source tags --&gt;
  &lt;?php 
  // If the constant _JEXEC is not defined, quit now.
  // This stops this script from running outside of the system.
  defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
  ?&gt;
  
  &lt;?php
  
  $user = JFactory::getUser(); 
  $id = $user-&gt;get('id'); 
  $name = $user-&gt;get('name');
  $username = $user-&gt;get('username'); 
  $department = $user-&gt;get('department');
  
  $vardate = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
  
  $acknowledge = 1;
  $courseTitle = $mainframe-&gt;getPageTitle();
  
  $courseDate = ;
  $courseHour =;
  
  
  /***************************************/
  
  $db = &amp;JFactory::getDBO();
  
  $query = "
  INSERT INTO
  `jos_jquarks_users_acknowledge`
  (
  course_name,
  user_id,
  employeeNumber,
  department,
  name,
  acknowledge,
  timeStamp,courseDate,
  courseHour
  )
  VALUES
  (
  '{$courseTitle}',
  '{$id}',
  '{$username}',
  '{$department}',
  '{$name}',
  '{$acknowledge}',
  '{$vardate}',
  '{$courseDate}',
  '{courseHour}'
  
   )";
  
  $db-&gt;setQuery($query);
  
  $db-&gt;query();
  
  
  if($db-&gt;getErrorNum()) { 
  JError::raiseError( 500, $db-&gt;stderr()); 
  }
  
  ?&gt;
  
  &lt;form name="quiz_info" method="post" action="&lt;?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?&gt;"&gt; 
  
  &lt;?php echo JText::_('Do you want to enroll into the course?') ; ?&gt;
  
  &lt;? $queryCourses="SELECT training_id,training,trainingDate FROM training"; ?&gt;
  
  $result = mysql_query ($queryCourses); 
  echo "&lt;select name=courseDates value=''&gt;Date&lt;/option&gt;"; 
  // printing the list box select command 
  
  while($nt=mysql_fetch_array($result)){//Array or records stored in $nt 
  echo "&lt;option value=$nt[id]&gt;$nt[training]&lt;/option&gt;"; 
  /* Option values are added by looping through the array */ 
  } 
  echo "&lt;/select&gt;";//Closing of list box
  
  &lt;input id="proceedButton" name="proceedButton" value="Acknowledge" type="submit" /&gt;
  
  &lt;input type="hidden" name="layout" value="default" /&gt; &lt;?php echo JHTML::_( 'form.token' ); ?&gt;
  
  &lt;/form&gt;
  
  {/source} 
  </code></pre>