Help needed on running a MYSQL script in the background of a web page and taking different actions dependent on the result - ajax

Question

I have a form on a web page, with one field to enter a code, to search for a property.
On clicking 'submit' I want to be able to run a script in the background without leaving the page.
The script will need to run a MYSQL statement which will have one of these results:
The property code does not exist, so display a Javascript Alert saying it does not exist.
The property is for sale, so call an existing javscript function 'saleSubmit(propertyCode)' to overwrite the exsiting web page with a new page sale.php for that property code
The property is for rent, so call an existing javscript function 'rentSubmit(propertyCode)' to overwrite the exsiting web page with a new page rent.php for that property code
The property is for sale and rent, so display 2 checkboxes within a div on the page to choose either the sales details or the rental details.
Can anybody point me in the right direction here?
Hi Nick - I think I screwed the system up a bit as I initially posted a question, then created an account which would not let me comment on the thread.
The status of the query is as simple as: does not exist, sale, rent, sale & rent
Extra advice would be really appreciated as I am problems googling for examples or a tutorial to point me in the right direction.
I first took this approach when I was looking at this problem to check that the form and Select statement were working correctly. So my form code looked like this:
<form name="idsearch" action="" method="post" onsubmit="xmlhttpPostForm('includes/idsearch-response.php', 'idsearch', 'idSearchResult', '<img src=\'images/loading.gif\'>'); return false;">
<input type="text" id="idRefNo" name="idRefNo" value="Enter Property Code" onfocus="this.value='';" />
GO <input type="image" src="img/template/search2.gif" alt="Click to Search for Properties"/>
and the php code called looked like this:
$idRefNo = $_POST['idRefNo'];
$query = "SELECT DISTINCT * FROM property WHERE property.Title = '".$idRefNo."' AND suspend != 'Yes'"; $result = #mysql_query ($query);
if ($result) { // If the query runs ok
if ($result != "") {
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array ($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
if ($row["BaseRental"] > 0 AND $row["Saleprice"] > 0) {
echo 'This property is for RENT and for SALE <br/>';
} else if ($row["BaseRental"] > 0) {
echo 'This property is for RENT only <br/>';
} else if ($row["Saleprice"] > 0) {
echo 'This property is for SALE only <br/>';
} else {
echo 'DOH! What is going on here!!! <br/>';
}
}
As I said above I would appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction to achieve what I want to do at the beginning of this thread.

Answer 1

First of all let's differentiate between the page(client) and your mysql database(server). Your page will have to send some request to your server which triggers a script to query the database. The result of that query is returned as a response to your page.
You could send a request by using javascript and the xmlhttprequest or try jquery which offers very simple methods to make requests ($.ajax(...)).
Your server and the script which queries your db should then return some meaningful status back to your client which has to interprete the result: Doing alerts, showing your div or whatever you'd like to do. I suggest returning the response as json which can be directly used in javascript without any parsing hassle. If the status of your query as simple as: does not exist, sale, rent, sale & rent. You could go as far and encode those as plaintext numbers, no json needed.