Fool proofing advice please.

Anon

Hi all,
I'm working on a script that inserts data into 3 related tables in MySQL.
It's all going quite well but I want to account for someone hitting 'refresh' and causing duplicate (and unwanted) enties.
The script uses PHP_SELF and sessions.

Here is an idea of wow the main decision making goes:

if ($page) { //user clicks 'another page'
check_page_fields();//error checking
$form=nextpage(); // form to show
insert_all(); // inserts data
$next_page=TRUE; // dont worry
} elseif ($finish) { // article finished
check_page_fields();
$form=article_entry();
insert_all();
unset($field); //resets title info
$next_page=FALSE;
}elseif ($head_entry) { // enter title etc
check_head_fields();
$next_page=FALSE;
$form=nextpage();
} else {

unset($field); //default display
$next_page=FALSE;
$form=article_entry();
}

Any ideas however 'generall' appreciated.

Cheers

Nick

fandelem

i would go with sessions and you go to call insert_all() check to see if the session_register variable has been set, if not, continue with insert, if it has been set, don't do anything, return out of the function.

however, if you want to make this span out of sessions, the 'fool proofing' needs to be within your insert_all() still -- simply query the database seeing if they have read the given article before.. then if they have, return out of the function, if they haven't, proceed with inserting..

hope this could help? heh sorry, still waking up.

knickerlas

Thanks for that,
I've come to the conclusion that it's all getting a bit muddled doing it all on one script and that I have so many functions defined that it might be a good opportunity to start learning about classes.

Stand by for the inevitable OOP Q's 😉

Thanks again

Nick