[Resolved] Getting Dynamically created POSTed vars

[Arc]

Hi all, I have a problem that has me baffeled.

I have a page that asks a user to enter a number into a textfield. The number he enters will be the number of Questions. This then goes to the next page that has Dynamically created textfields based on the number the user entered. SO if he entered 3 there would be 3 textfields.

Now each textfield is named like "answers1", "answers2","answers3" etc...

In these textfields the user will enter another set of numbers for the number of answers each question will have.

For example: He entered 3 in the first textfield which means there are 3 questions, he now has 3 textfields in front of him where he will enter the number of answers for each question.

So if he entered 2 into the first textfield and 5 into the second textfield and 3 into the third textfield and then clicks the submit button it should take him to the next page and display textfields like this

Question1
                    Answer1
                    Answer2
Question2
                   Answer1
                   Answer2
                   Answer3
                   Answer4
                   Answer5
Question3
                   Answer1
                   Answer2
                   Answer3

Now my problem is, I know how many questions the user chose so I know how many textfields are being Posted to the next page in this case it would be 3 and I know the name of those textfields "answers1", "answers2","answers3" but how do I get the values of those textboxes?

I can't manualy harcode it to say $NumAnswers = $_POST[Answers1] because there could be any number of textfields. And I cant do a For loop and append the number onto the word Answers because that doesn't seem to work.

I remember there is some sort of PHP command to get the array of posted variables but I can't remember what it's called and I'm not sure that would work.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks! 😃

[Weedpacket]

Since the 'Answer1' in $POST['Answer1'] (not $POST[Answer1], which is bad practice) is just a string, it can be assembled in any way any other string can be; so you can successively construct 'Answer1', 'Answer2', ... in a loop and look at the corresponding variable in the $_POST[] array.

The problem is knowing which answers are there or not - if you just keep going until you hit a blank, you can't immediately tell if it's blank because there weren't that many answers or because whoever filled the form in just missed that one.

Much easier to work with is if you put the answers into an array, instead of separate variables.

Name the fields "Answer[1]", "Answer[2]", etc.. Then in the processing script they'll be accessible as $POST['Answer'][1], $POST['Answer'][2], etc., and all of PHP's array-handling functions will be there to help you get information out of them: count($POST['Answer']) to say how many Answer fields were filled in; array_keys($POST['Answer']) will list the corresponding numbers for which fields they were; foreach($_POST['Answer'] as $number=>$answer) to loop through all the answer fields....

Going further, if you name the fields "Answer[1][1]", "Answer[1][2]", ..., "Answer[2][1]", ..., where the first index is the number of the question the answer applies to, then your answers won't get mixed up with each other: all the answers to question 1 will be in $POST['Answer'][1] (as an array: $POST['Answer'][1][1], $POST['Answer'][1][2], etc.), all the answers to question 2 will be in $POST['Answer'][2], and so on.

[anortrup]

The way the php handles forms is quite nice in the way that you can create arrays of form data. You do this by stating the name of the field with square brackets after it (to make the array assoiatve you can put a name in the brackets. So using this you can do this

Your first question:
<input type="text" name="numQuestions">

Then when the data is posted

<?php

for($x=0; $x < $_POST['numQuestion']; $x++) {
     echo "<input type=\"text\" name=\"numAnswers[$x]\">";
}

so now you can let them input the number of answers they will need and you can create text fields to get the answers like this:

<?php

foreach($_POST['numAnswers'] as $numAnswers) {
    for($x=0; $x<$numAnswers; $x++) {
        echo "Question $numAnswer Answer #$x: <input type=\"text\" name=\"answer[$numAnswers][$x]\">";
    }
}

and after you get those sets of fields posted you will have a multi-dimensional array that will have all of your answers arranged like this

question 0 answers (0, 1, 2, 3)
question 1 answers (0, 1, 2, 3)

I hope that helps. Also it's a good idea to check that the input that your getting back are in fact numbers, verification is the basis of a solid and safe application.

-Andy
[e-mail]

[Arc]

Cool that really helped, thanks alot!😃 I may need some more hel on this subject as I have to pass all the new textfields i just created onto yet another page.

I am creating arrays of each one

An Array of Questions then another array of answers for each question, I then have to pass all those array to another page and extract all the info from them.

Gunna give it a shot, I'll leave this thread open for now.

Thanks again!~😃

[Arc]

Man I didn;t think I would be able to pull this off. This is probably the most complex thing i've attempted in PHP. Thanks again for the help.

Here is the code I used in case anyone ever needs a good example of passing dynamically created arrays from page to page.

$Sql="INSERT INTO tblProducts (CategoryID,ProductName,ProductSnipet,ProductDescription,ProductPrice,Shipping,SKU,UnitsInStock,ReorderLevel,FullImage,ThumbNail) VALUES ('$Category','$Name','$Summary','$FullDesc','$Price','$Shipping','$SKU','$Stock','$ReStock','$FullImage','$ThumbNail')";
$Result=mysql_query($Sql) or die ("Unable to complete database transaction 1");

//If there are product Questions Insert them
If(count($_POST['txtQuestion']) >0){
//Get Newest ProductID from tblProducts
 $ProductID = mysql_insert_id(); 

//Insert Questions into tblProductQuestion
  For($Counter=0; $Counter<count($_POST['txtQuestion']); $Counter++){
    $Question=$_POST['txtQuestion'][$Counter];
   $Sql="INSERT INTO tblProductQuestions (ProductID,Question) VALUES ('$ProductID','$Question')";
   $Result=mysql_query($Sql) or die ("Unable to complete database transaction 3");

   //Get latest QuestionID
   $QuestionID = mysql_insert_id();

  //Insert Questions into tblProductQuestion
  $AnswerName="txtQuestion".$Counter;
    For($Counter2=0; $Counter2<count($_POST[$AnswerName]); $Counter2++){
      $Answer=$_POST[$AnswerName][$Counter2];
      $Sql="INSERT INTO tblProductAnswers (ProductID,QuestionID,Answer) VALUES ('$ProductID','$QuestionID','$Answer')";
      $Result=mysql_query($Sql) or die ("Unable to complete database transaction 5");
	}
  }
}

[anortrup]

The best way to pass the posts from the previous page on to the next step in you form is through hidden fields. You can loop through all of the POST data like this:

foreach($_POST as $name=>$value) {
    echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"$name\" value=\"$value\">";
}

That will pass on all of your variables....make sure you don't duplicate names of form fields on the way which can cause trouble.

-Andy