Large form processing/validation

tomgone

Hiya all,

Looked through the posts but nothing really close to what I'm looking for. Basically, I have a large form (actually a set of large form, part of an interview system) and I want to validate the forms to make sure a) data has been entered, and b) it is in proper forms (i.e. dates are dates etc). I do this checking with JavaScripts now and it works fine, but I want to do PHP checking as well in case people have turned JavaScript off or are using old browsers/Lynx for example.

Currently I pass the form data through a POST call, but is there any way of storing the form in a session_variable, and then use that? Main reason for this is, if there is an error, I want to return to the form, indicate there is an error, highlight those entries which are wrong (based on session variables) and also put the "correct" entries back into their fields as defaults.

If anyone has any code, or main ideas, I would appreciate that very much.

Cheers
TG

Anon

i do something like this

form.php:

if($page1){
check for page one values, if one is missing, set $page=1 else $page=2
}
elseif($page2) {
check vals, if there submit to db(or whatever) or set $page=2
}

if($page==1) {
print "<input type=submit value=page1>"
}
elseif($page==2) {
print "<input type=submit value=page2>"
}

everything is handled by one php page so you dont need to use sessions - just pass hidden form elements to the next page. make sure you use stripslashes for the elements being passed.

-paul
http://xhawk.net

tomgone

Cheers Paul. My main problem though seems to be the way radio buttons which are not ticked are treated. I use HTTP_POST_VARS now to put all information into an associative array (as I need to do other things with these as well), but as I am looping through the HTTP_POST_VARS, those Radio buttons which are not ticked, do not get passed which is a major problem really.

What I have in my form is something like: choose your marital status Single [], Married [], Divorced [], Other []. If the user selects other, I need to check as well if they have typed text in an associated text field. But if they ignore all checks and just press submit, no value at all is found, except of course the text field.

Hmmm
TG