pass form values to 2 pages

Anon

I was wondering if it is possible to pass values to 2 seperate pages in a form using php. Page one is a html page that would take the values from the form and place them in the correct areas; the other Page two, would display a confirm page and then mail the contents of the first page to a specified person. The mail would be a html mail with the values from the page one. Please let me know if anyone has any ideas if this could be done or if there is a better way to do this? THanks, Bart

kparker

I think you should forget about pages for the moment and just concentrate on the end you wish to achieve. Once that's worked out, things will be easier to explain. For example, it's not at all clear to me what "placing values in the correct areas" means.

kparker

Also, don't forget that your php script/program can carry out any amount of calculating, emailing, saving to database files, etc, that you want, subject only to the timeout limitation (and you may have the authority to override that, too.)

It's only the HTTP transaction that's limited to a single round trip (GET or POST ==> document returned to the browser.)

Anon

Sorry for the unclear explanation let me know if this helps. I would like to have a form do 2 things. 1 echo a few select values on a confirm page and 2nd place values that were entered in the form in a seperate html page. This seperate html page will be emailed to a person with the form results upon completetion of the form. The email would be a html page with the data from the form. My problem is that when i am sending a email i could not pass the values to the html page. (the action varaible is set to the confirm page and from there i also send the email out) I can echo the variables fine on the confirm page. The email is a dynamically generated html template that needs to have the values from the form echoed. So i was wondering if i could have the form values passed to both those pages at the same time? Sending the value in the url would not be possible since i allow for attachments.

kparker

Again, it's forcing your thought in terms of "pages" that's causing at least half the problem here. Let's try it this way and see if I'm getting the idea:

User fills out an html form, that includes, among other things, a FILE field.
Form is POSTed to a URL that represents a php script on your site.
You wish to:
   a. Return a confirmation page to the user/browser.
   b. Send the data from the POST fields via email to someone      else. (and it just so happens that the mail you
     send should be html-formatted mail, and also
     include as file attachments any documents
     that were uploaded as part of the POST).

If that's it, then PHP can easily do that, and you only need a single PHP script to do it. In fact, the outline above provides a very sketchy top-level pseudocode for how you would proceed. The only complicated part that I can see is going to be getting the uploaded files sent as file attachments, and that's complicated partly because it's platform-specific (unlike the basic mail() function, you'll have to create mime-encoded email, except that on linux it might be easier to exec() a command-line utility to do the heavy lifting for you.)

Anon

You got everything exactly right about what i would like done. My problem is i would like to use this code to read the file and put in the correct values (what i mean is just to echo the form contents). But what i have discovered is that the file is not parsed and that is the reason the values are not being echoed(i think?) here is the code i have so far:

$to = "someone";

$userfile = "html_email.php";

$mail_boundary = md5(uniqid(time()));
$mail_headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$mail_headers .= "Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"$mail_boundary\"\r\n\r\n";
$mail_headers .= "This is a multi-part message in MIME format.\r\n\r\n";

$fp = fopen($userfile, "r");
$file = fread($fp, filesize($userfile));
$file = chunk_split(base64_encode($file));

$new_mail_body = "--$mail_boundary\r\n";
$new_mail_body .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$new_mail_body .= "Content-transfer-encoding:base64\r\n\r\n";
$new_mail_body .= $file . "\r\n\r\n";
$new_mail_body .= "--$mail_boundary--";

$mail_body = $new_mail_body;

mail($to,$subj,$mail_body,$mail_headers);

this works great i get the html email from the userfile variable the html_email.php and i get attachments too.
i would like to not have to type all the html into one line to mail it and also i would like to do this with multiple forms. Do you see anyway i can also get the form values to this html_email.php file and have the file parsed by php? I noticed when i received the email and view the source it showed a actual <? echo $x; ?> statement so i could tell it was not being parsed.

kparker

I'm not an expert on MIME, so I can't really say what you should do differently there. However, the matter of getting the POSTed fields is easy: just iterate through the array of POST variables:

$form_results = '';

while (list ($key, $val) = each ($HTTP_POST_VARS))
   {
   if ($val != '')
      {
      $form_results .= "$key: $val\n";
      }
   }

This assumes that part of the email can be sent plain text. If not, substitute <br> for \n, use a table, or whatever suits you.

Anon

This is possible. I had a situation where I wanted to post form contents to a cgi-script and have my own thank-you/confirmation page. You can post data to another PHP script or cgi-script from within a PHP script using the following function (This example posts a page to the SkyTel web pager):

HTTP POST function

function PostToHost($host, $path, $data_to_send)
{
$fp = fsockopen($host, 80);
fputs($fp, "POST $path HTTP/1.1\n");
fputs($fp, "Host: $host\n");
fputs($fp, "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\n");
fputs($fp, "Content-length: ".strlen($data_to_send)."\n");
fputs($fp, "Connection: close\n\n");
fputs($fp, $data_to_send);
fclose($fp);
}

$data = "to=$pagerpin&message=$pagetext&Submit=Send Message";
$host = "www.skytel.com";
$path = "/cgi-bin/page.pl";

PostToHost($host, $path, $data);

Make sure that you use the variable names in the $data string that the resulting script is expecting.

Jon

Anon

Thanks i will have to try this.