Pasing objects via a form post

[Anon]

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to pass an object via a hidden form field.

I want to do this because I create an object on one page and I want to pass this object and it's data to another page.

Thanks

[Anon]

In principle, it can be done:
1. Serialize the object into a variable:
$serialized=serialize($object);

2. Run htmlspecialchars() on the result:
   $HTMLserialized=htmlspecialchars($serialized);

3. Output to the HTML form:

<form action="xxxxxxx" method="post">
<input type="hidden" value="<?php print $HTMLserialized ?>">
.....
</form>

BUT:
This is a bad way to pass objects between pages. And it's potentially a security risk, because the object could contain sensitive information (e.g.: If the object contains database information like a database password).

The good way to do it is to use sessions. There are several articles about using sessions around the Web (probably also at PHPBuilder). When using sessions, it's perfectly OK to use objects as session variables. (I do it, and it works well.) There have been bugs related to objects-serilization in PHP, but the latest PHP should be fine in this respect.