Calling the &quot;next&quot; form

Calling the "next" form

Anon

Anybody know of a way to have one form, based up some user input, call another form?

I have a form with two radio buttons. I want to be able to call one of two other forms, based upon the user's selection.

I have tried setting up the first form as:

Then, based upon which radio button is selected, I set $next_form to the appropriate form. But I can't get $next_form to take on any value, no matter what the user does, until he hits the "submit" button. Then it's too late.

I've thought of using redirection on an intermediate form, e.g.,
Header("Location: $next_form");

But the intermediate form the header constuct is on can't do anything before the header call, so I can't pass this form anything.

Seems like this should be simple, but it's not.

Anon

Ok, first off PHP is a server side language so by the time the user sees anything on the screen PHP has finished doing it's work. So your action="<? echo $next_form; ?>" line will end up being action="" if you don't have any value in $next_form when the user calls your page. To do what you want you are going to need to use Javascript, which is a client side language, to manipulate the action value of your form.

Second if you want to use an intermediary page to redirect your user to the appropriate place based on the radio button that is fine (look at Yahoo, that's how they do everything). But you are completely mistaken in thinking that you can't do anything before the header() call. You can do anything you want, as long as you don't output anything to the browser. So your intermediary script should start with <?php as the very fist thing. Then you can write any code you want to do anything you want, like read the value of the radio button and output the correct header(). But if your script has even 1 space before the <?php start tag then your server will send header information and you won't be able to use the header() function.

Anon

Thanks for that info.

Yes, I am painfully aware of watching out for doing dumb things when using redirection, like putting spaces before the header call. I think we see this issue come up once a day or so on this forum #-)

Question:

Can I make my header call part of a form then? IOW, since I have to use a form (I'm using hidden variables) to receive the value of the radio button that was pressed on the previous form, will this approach work? You seem to be saying it will, if I understood you properly.

Thanks in advance.

Anon

Here's the trick (or, I should say, code) that allows me to choose which page will be displayed next:

<?
if ($Var == 1)
Header("Location: http://www.mysite.com/MyNextForm.php3");
else
Header("Location: http://www.mysite.com/MyHome.php3");
?>

$Var is intrinsicly passed from the previous form via the radio buttons, e.g.:

Note that, as others have said here, that you CAN do things before calling the header function, as LONG as you are careful not to output anything to the browser page before the call.

Anon

Exactly.