Preview form data and also be able to submit it to database.

johnskywalker99

Hello
I'm currently working on an a web admin tool (aren't we all 😉) for my local school and I want them to be able to preview the data that they have inputted into a text box that contains basic html <b><i><p> etc, however I don't want them to have to submit the entire form in order to do this so I've got the textbox they are writing the data to in a different <form> from the rest of the data so :
<html>
<body>

What I want to do is be able to pass the variable to the preview page but also put it into a hidden field in my rest of data form. How do I get the 'preview form' to write information to the 'rest_of_data' form.

Cheers for any help!
john

theslinky

Use javascript:

</form>

here's the javascript to go along with it:

make sure you give the form a name="" attribute. i named it myform in the above example.

-sridhar

Weedpacket

What you'd be better off using would be session variables (see the manual for all the weird and wonderfuls this entails).

What you'd have would be that the preview script would store the textfield-entered data in a session variable. Once it has been stored there, you can fetch it out again, alter it, format it, display it, and whatever it until you (and the user) are both good and ready to put it in the database.

Needless to say, you can store any and all of your form data in session variables; with the upshot that you can spread a long and/or complex form over however many pages you please.

If your form pages check the session variables to see if they're set, then you can have back buttons so that users can go back to earlier pages of the form and find that their previously-entered data has been pre-filled for them.

johnskywalker99

many thanks for both responses to my post. I had been working with javascript usuing something like:
document.form.submit() but I just couldn't work out how to get it back into the main form. I'm currently trying to work with sessions but this has caused my learning curve to SPIKE rather dramatically😕 but I appreciate the input and feedback on my post, cheers.

John

johnskywalker99

Hello
The javascript resolution above prints:

[object TEXTAREA]

With no additional variable passed from the form if you've got any idea of how to resolve this I would very much appreciate it.

Cheers JOhn