Auto-Incrimenting of variables?

Anon

I've built a page for my company's managers that uses checkboxes to authorize commission requests submitted by employees. It does a MySQL query and formats a list showing a description of the commission request, and then provides a checkbox to either accept or deny their request.

Because there's 2 checkboxes bound to each row, I needed someway to differentiate each returned row's checkboxes from the previous and following rows. So I set an auto-incrimenting variable (which was being used anyway) to slap a number on the checkboxes. So on a two row return, I would have

$id1 for an accepted check, row 1.
$id2 for an accepted check, row 2.
$deny1 for a denied check, row 1.
$deny2 for a denied check, row 2.

Then you select whichever options you want, and it posts the form. The problem arises in the action part of the script. I had to figure out a way to perform a while function for each of the incrimenting variables. And I still have no real way to make it automatically incriment. What I ended up doing was sticking a static amount of variables into an array and then using a foreach command.

My question is if there's a cleaner way to make it automatically incriment a variable number (go from $id1 to $id2 if ($id2 != "") ) or if I have to stick to a static assignment. I'll past my form script, and my action script so you can see what I did. I hope the notation doesn't get too munged when I post. 🙂

Thanks for any thought put to the question.

while ($data = mysql_fetch_array($results)) {
$i++; $currentcolor = $i % 2;
if ($currentcolor==0) { $bgcolor="lightblue"; } else { $bgcolor="#98ACC8"; }
print "<TR bgcolor=".$bgcolor.">\n";
print "<TD align=\"center\">".$data[employee]."</TD>\n";
print "<TD align=\"center\">".$data[timestamp]."</TD>\n";
print "<TD align=\"center\">".$data[description]."</TD>\n";
print "<TD align=\"center\">$".$data[value]."</TD>\n";
print "<TD align=\"center\"><INPUT type=\"checkbox\" name=\"id".$i."\" value=\"".$data[id]."\">\n";
print " / <INPUT type=\"checkbox\" name=\"deny".$i."\" value=\"".$data[id]."\">\n";
print "</TD>";
print "</TR>";
}

Action:

$id = array ($id1, $id2, $id3, $id4, $id5, $id6, $id7, $id8, $id9, $id10);
foreach ($id as $currentid) {
if ($currentid == "") { } else { //perform function here }

Anon

I don't know everything you're facing, but that seems like a problem that's resulting from a poor design decision.

Why don't you just implement a drop-down menu with a couple options: Allow, disallow, save(think about).

Each one would have an ID associated with the request, and that would keep them all separate ...

Or am I just not seeing the complexity of your project here?

Anon

There's two problems with that:

One, the checkbox keeps the accept/deny on different variables. This is critical because there's no way for me to pass in one form the information linking which pull-down menu goes with what SQL row. I would need to use the pull down to define authorize or deny variable and have no way to bind that selection with the unique ID of the SQL row. Whereas with the checkbox, it's able to pass the unique ID AS the variable in either the $id (accept) or $deny (deny) field.

print "<TD align=\"center\"><INPUT type=\"checkbox\" name=\"id".$i."\" value=\"".$data[id]."\">\n";

Also, even if they were consolidated, I would still have the same problem originally of having to name each pull down select a different variable, and have to assign a static number of variables into an array for the foreach { } command to work.

The thing is, you're updating multiple SQL rows with different information through a single form. Right now I have the query that builds the form just limit by 10, and have 10 entries in the array function. But I would like to make it a bit more dynamic.