Alternative to Submit?

ssanders82

Hey, I was wondering if there was a way to force a <a href> link to act as a submit button. I need to pass a lot of variables that I don't want sitting in the URL on the next page, but I would like my "Next" link (currently a submit button) to match my "Back" link at the bottom of the page. That might sound stupid but I have come across some other instances where I could use it too and was just curious. Thanks.

killerbishop

Why don't you consider using sessions then - since this would allow you to store information seamlessly between pages (maintaining state), but only add:

PHPSESSID=3746324872687269sadsd1

or something similiar to each link, for reference:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

ssanders82

Hey killerbishop, thanks. I looked into sessions and they definately look like a good solution. I am looking at storing up to several text pages of data as a "description" variable" but I couldn't find in the PHP manual how big a session variable can be. Anyone know?

killerbishop

Session data is actually stored on the server, the default being "file" containers. This is actually a file that contains a serialized form of the variables you want to session_register(). Therefore, in theory, they can be as big as you want (within limitations of the file system on your particular server, for example, on Linux, this means 2 G😎.

The client only stores the session ID, not the data. This is handled either via a cookie (the default), or, if the client doesn't support cookies, by a URL propagation, using something like:

http://www.example.com?PHPSESSID=dfhsdkjhfsafw94579fd03