retaining data to next page...

Anon

I know the subject doesn't do justice to what I'm about to ask, so I'll try to make it simple and to the point.

I have a series of 3 pages, all a portion of an add interface to an oracle table.

The first page requires the user to enter in specific data, the second checks the database based on the criteria entered by the user and either: a. inserts the new record into the database, or b. redirects a user to an error page alerting them to the problem of a duplicate entry.

My problem is that the error page that loads does not retain the values from the first entry page. Is there a way to do so? I've toyed with the @HTTP_VARS on both the error page, and on the checking page... to no avail..

Just so you guys have an idea of the snippet that does this...

while (ocifetch($sql_statement)) {
ociresult($sql_statement,"COLUMN");
}
$count = OCIRowCount($sql_statement);
if ($count >= 1) {
header("Location: http://somesite/error_page.php");
} else {
continue on with the insert and successful notation.....

aleph_x

You can solve your problems with sessions. PHP allows you to store user specific data on the server using sessions. Here's a quick example:

Let's say you want to persist the variable $myStuff over several pages.

<?
session_register("myStuff");
?>

This is will make $myStuff a session variable and it will persist as long as the session exists. Note there is no dollar sign in the register declaration. Retrieving session variables is easy because, well, its PHP. Just treat it like any other variable:

<? echo $myStuff; ?>

When you switch pages you need to identify which session you want to access (since there can be multiple sessions at once). To do so just pass the SID in the URL string of the page you're linking to:

echo "<a href=newpage.php?" . SID . ">Go here</a>"

Hopefully that will get you going. Definately read up more on sessions, there is an abundant supply of online material written on them.

Anon

you rock! thanks for the prompt reply... I'll give it a shot and see what sort of damage I can do.

Anon

My next question is, though, that from the example you gave, session_register is assigned manually... what if I wanted the session to be whatever it was the user entered in on the first page?

example:

session_register("data_entered_by_user")

echo "$data_entered_by_user"

Make sense?

aleph_x

On page 1:

session_register("data_entered_by_user);

$data_entered_by_user = "Hello world";

On page 2 (making sure you pass in SID as an URL parameter):

echo $data_entered_by_user;

should produce "Hello world".

When you pass Page 2 the SID, PHP will automatically retrieve all session data and create variables with the appropriate names.