Sal Barry on "Passing values in the URL from page to page"

First, thank you for any insight you may be able to offer.

I am trying to build a "non-blog", yet PHP/MySQL-driven section on my WordPress blog, using two "pages"--one for the "List View" and one for the "Item View".

I made a 2nd MySQL database table and populated it with data.

I made a new Page that queries the specific DB table and displays the results in a list.

The problem is trying to pass dynamic values onto the "Item View" page.

What I normally do is pass on values through the URL string, like this:

detail_page.php?value1=somevalue&value2=somevalue

But this does not work in WordPress, since it does not use file name extensions.

I tried this...

<a href="detail_page?value1=somevalue&value2=somevalue>
[no .php extension]

...but that didn't work either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.