Lesson 2: Display Students (READ)

📘 Introduction

In this lesson, students will learn how to retrieve and display records from the database using MySQLi procedural programming. This is the “R” in CRUD — READ. We will fetch all student records and display them inside a Bulma-styled table.

📄 Step 1: Write SQL Query to Fetch Students

We use SELECT to retrieve all rows from the students table.

$sql = "SELECT * FROM students ORDER BY id DESC";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $sql);

The mysqli_query() function sends the SQL command to MySQL and returns a result set.

🔁 Step 2: Loop Through Results

We use mysqli_fetch_assoc() to convert each row into an associative array.

while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)){
    echo $row['name'];
}

This loop runs once for each student record.

📊 Step 3: Display Students in a Bulma Table

Bulma provides a clean table layout using the table class. We will embed PHP inside HTML to dynamically generate rows.

<table class="table is-striped is-fullwidth">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>ID</th>
            <th>Name</th>
            <th>Email</th>
            <th>Phone</th>
            <th>Actions</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <?php
        while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)){
            echo "<tr>
                    <td>{$row['id']}</td>
                    <td>{$row['name']}</td>
                    <td>{$row['email']}</td>
                    <td>{$row['phone']}</td>
                    <td>
                        <a class='button is-small is-info' href='edit.php?id={$row['id']}'>Edit</a>
                        <a class='button is-small is-danger' href='delete.php?id={$row['id']}'>Delete</a>
                    </td>
                  </tr>";
        }
        ?>
    </tbody>
</table>

🧠 Syntax Breakdown

• SELECT * FROM students — retrieves all student records.
• ORDER BY id DESC — newest records appear first.
• mysqli_query() — sends SQL to MySQL.
• mysqli_fetch_assoc() — fetches each row as an associative array.
• echo "<tr>...</tr>" — prints dynamic HTML.

🧪 Exercise

Modify the SQL query to sort students alphabetically by name:

SELECT * FROM students ORDER BY name ASC

Reload the page and confirm the list is now alphabetical.