Yeah, sounds kinda nuts, but I want to be able to use a generic SELECT... WHERE... statement that can do sporadic limiting.

Here's an example of what's going on:

SELECT * FROM Table1 WHERE Region='$region' AND State='$state' AND Country='$country'

The user provides input through drop-down boxes. It's possible that they may pick a region but no state or country, or they may ask for a country but no state or region (or a country and state, but no region... you get the idea).

So what I'm baffled about is what to set a variable to when I don't want the WHERE statement to limit by that particular field. Is this possible? I feel like there should be an easy answer so I must be looking so hard for it in the manual and related texts that I'm looking right past it.

I realize that I could customize the SELECT statement by doing a bunch of if/then checks, but it's such a messy solution (and my SELECT statement is already pretty messy because I'm using several tables...the example above is way oversimplified).

Thanks for whatever help you can give me!

chanel