Code generated Checkboxs Checking

Anon

Ok this is the code we use to generate from our Database the checkboxs. This works fine.

<?php
$query = "SELECT * FROM Category";
$result = mysql_query ($query,$db_link_id);
$total_num_cat=mysql_num_rows($result);
// session_register("total_num_cat");
if($total_num_cat!=0){
for ($i=0; $i<$total_num_cat; $i++){
$current_row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td colspan='3'>";
echo "<input type='checkbox' name='category$current_row[3]' value='ON'>$current_row[1]";
echo "</td>";
echo "</tr>";
}
}else{
$error_msg="No records found";
echo "$error_msg\n";
}
?>

now what we want to do is check to see what ones of these checkboxs get checked to then populate them into an array to display more selectable items in the pages that are to follow. I tested a method of using isset on themm by going through a loop of the generated names, but for some reason it didnt work. Is it posible to check to see if generated checkboxs are checked by code? And yes the generated checkboxs are within a <form> and </form> tag 🙂. Any Help on this problem would be much apreciated. Oh i did use httpost_var method to get around this... just on the 3rd set of checkboxs the code would be like 2-3000 lines long to use that methed solution that was worked out.

Anon

First off I'd change the naming scheme that you've choosen. They way you have it you have to parse all variables that start with category. It's much easier if you make your checkboxes have a name like category[]. PHP will automatically turn all selected checkboxes into an array on submit.

Second instead of having the value be 'ON' make that the $current_row[3], which I'm assuming is a unique identifier of some sort.

Now you can easily loop through your array and get all of the unique ID's that were selected.

reset($category);

while (list($key, $value) = each($category)) {
// do what you need to do here
}

It's that simple, you will get the variable $value populated with the unique id that you assigned to the value of each checkbox, for each one that was selected, if none were selected the loop doesn't even process.