how to do this ? steps between two scripts

AbuAnas

Well, I don't know how to explain it but let me try using an example:

If I am doing an orders processing script ..
Now, I assumed the script will use the steps method

and then there would be a switch to check what step we are at and take the correct actions..

When the payment step comes.. the user should select the payment method that he likes ..

Since would like to offer more than one method of payment and each method will collect different type of info from the information (i.e. using the credit card method we need to get the cc information), also the script should be scalable in away that I can add more payment methods at the future as plugins

what I thought to do is (though it is not well cooked in my mind) is as follow

each payment method will be in a seprate file like payment_paymentname.php (i.e. payment_cc.php)
after the user selected the payment method the control should be transfared to the payment_method.php file either by include() or transfaring the user to the file url.
the payment script will process the payment data
and then transfare the control back to the main script

What do you think about this approuch ??
How can I implement it ??

Do you have any other ideas to do this ??

-AbuAnas

feldon23

Nothing preventing you from having one PHP file for all the steps.

You would just have the script proceed to "{$PHP_SELF}?step=1", "{$PHP_SELF}?step=2", etc.

and your script would be laid out:

if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
  // validate the form
} else {
  // display the form
  if ($_GET['step'] == 1) {
    DO STUFF FOR STEP 1
  } elseif ($_GET['step'] == 2) {
    DO STUFF FOR STEP 2
  } elseif ($_GET['step'] == 3) {
  .
  .
  .
  }
}

Also you should write a function 'validate_form' which you can pass a list of form items for each step that must be filled out. $required and $form are both arrays:

// We got errors the last time the form was submitted.
// We're just displaying them.

if ($_GET['errors'] != '') {
  $errors = explode(',',$_GET['errors']);
  foreach ($errors as $value) {
    echo "You did not fill out an entry for the {$value} field.<br>\n";
  }
}

function validate_form($required, $form) {
  $errors = '';
  foreach ($required as $key => $value) {
    if ($form[$key] =='') {
      $errors .= "{$key},";
    }
  }
  return $errors;
}

// form validation
$errors = validate_form(array('name','email','phone1','city'),$_POST);

// we've validated the form and found errors, so we're going back to the same step and going to list the errors.
if ($errors != '') {
  header ("$PHP_SELF."?step=".$_GET['step']."errors=".$errors);
}

trooper

A more secure way would to be to use $POST and not $GET or even sessions

HTH

AbuAnas

Sure ..

But this way is not modular enough ..

Each time I would like to add a new payment method or remove an old one or disable it I have to edit the code ..

AbuAnas