How do I Edit Fields A-La Carte

dupreesdiamond

Yes I searched, then I got up this morning and I searched again, and I just finished searching again so here goes (and found some wonderful un-releated information along the way):

I am building a client tracking system for a massage therapist, which will track client info, across, so far, 4 MySQL tables (address', contact, intake info, and session info)

I have it to the point where the user can add a client, delelete a client, or edit ALL the associated info from one form.

What I want to do is allow the user to edit a single field at will by clicking the appropriate "edit" button from the client detail page, which displays data from all 4 tables.

Like so
Contact:

FNAME LNAME <edit>
PHONE <edit>

Address <edit>

DOB <edit>

Med1 <edit>
med2 <edit>
med3 <edit>
....

You get the idea can anyone point towards the path of discovery on this one?

I have the SQL under control what I don't know is how the <a href> would be built or passed to an edit page. (that Ideally would show the same read-only Detail page but show the chosen "edit" field in the proper input tag.

Thanks,
JP

Looking for a nice DB interaction class?

google <?php ez_sql.php ?> (prolly on this site somewhere) Has worked wonders for me!!

Weedpacket

Since it sounds like this is an internal administration site you don't have to worry so much about trying to support every single http client in existence. That means you've got the opportunity to, for example, insist that Javascript be enabled for the site. With that you can play around quite a bit with having the user build a custom form containing the fields they wish to edit (two examples I found by Googling on Javascript DOM forms are http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/usableforms.html and http://digital-web.com/features/feature_2003-05b.shtml).

The idea is that each of your edit buttons can create/destroy the relevant form field of the appropriate type with an appropriate name (say "table_field"). The form initially displays with the form details as ordinary text, with edit buttons alongside.
(There will also be a hidden field or so that contains the ID(s) of the records being displayed.)

Clicking the edit button creates the appropriate form field alongside the relevant data (even cooler, the field replaces the text, but it will be important to initialise the field with the appropriate data); clicking the edit button again destroys the form field (and cancels that particular edit). Submission involves submitting only the fields that have actually been changed (i.e., those form fields that exist on the page at that moment). This has two advantages:
(1) The form is a lot simpler to look at and easier to read - a lot less intimidating and by limiting the form fields that are available at any given time, less prone to errors.
(2) The requests back to the server are a lot smaller.
There is also the advantage that most of the javascript could be wrapped up in a .js file which is then cached by the browser - reducing bandwidth there, too.

The PHP end of that is pretty straightforward, it seems; you can see which form fields were submitted with preg_grep('//', array_keys($POST)) - this assumes that only those "table_field" names contain underscores. The result will be an array which you can loop through to explode on the underscore to see which table and which field is being updated; and the hidden fields will tell you which record.

The Javascript end ... well, I do recommend a Javascript forum (www.codingforums.com is the first that leaps to mind) 'cos there will be a fair bit of to-do about how knowing which type of input field to display for which fields and so forth. That would probably need a bit of PHP as well, but I haven't slept on the problem yet, so I'm not going to blurt out what will probably be rubbish.

dupreesdiamond

I thought this would be a simple project 😃

Thanks for the great information!
I guess there is no time like the present to start exploring JS.

Thanks again,
JP