Making web forms easy

fatmaninspeedos

Is there a way to make web form processing easy? For example, take a database table you want to put online that has basic Contact information. I need a page that allows a user to add and edit contacts.

INSERTING:
- validating form input
- writing all the fields to a database

UPDATING:
- retrieving values from the database
- populating form fields
- validating data
- writing all the fields to a database

Is is easy to do with PHP, but if you have 200+ tables, the coding gets very repetitive, especially if you consider database code in addition to the PHP. There has to be an easy to to create these types of forms.

Suggestions?

TheDefender

Well you could look into classes and functions to modularize everything. That's about the only way to keep it manageable when you are dealing with that many tables. Google "PHP Function Tutorials" and "PHP Class Tutorials" and you will probably find some useful help on this.

onion2k

Generate the forms and the SQL on the fly based of the mysql table description... The code for doing this is pretty easy to figure out.. and if you get stuck just nick it from PhpMyAdmin. 😉

iTZKooPA

Actually I just figured most of this out myself. The only hard part I had doing was the updating feature (getting it to populate the HTML form). My below code shows the simple things I did but there is no error checking (since my fields are all text).

echo(
			'<form action="'.$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].'?updatejob='.$JobID.'" method="post">


		<p>Type your job description here:<br />
		<textarea name="JobDesc" rows="10" cols="40" wrap>'.$rowDesc.' 
		</textarea><br />


		<input type="submit" name="updatejob" value="SUBMIT" />
		</p>
		</form><br />
		<form action="'.$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].'?deletejob='.$JobID.'" method="post">
		<input type="submit" name="deletejob" value="Delete" />
		</p>
		</form>');

That just the Update portion, for the adding you simply don't have it inject $rowDesc into the form.

As you may notice the submit sends the webpage back to itself. In the same file I have it check to see if the ?updatejob=X is in the link, if so then it run this block of code to update the database:

if (isset($_POST['updatejob'])) {
$sql = "update Jobs set JobDesc = "$jobdesc" where ID = $ID";}

Now the only thing I don't know how to do is update multi things in one line (something like update Jobs set JobDesc = "$jobdesc" where ID = $ID, obName = "$jobname" where ID = $ID).

Paul_Jr

Originally posted by iTZKooPA
Now the only thing I don't know how to do is update multi things in one line (something like update Jobs set JobDesc = "$jobdesc" where ID = $ID, obName = "$jobname" where ID = $ID).

You can list as many field = value pairs as you want by separating them with a comma:

$sql = "UPDATE `table` SET `field` = 'Val', `field2` = 'Val2', `field3` = 'Val3' WHERE `some_field` = 'SomeVal'";

iTZKooPA

Thanks save me some update time. I kept trying with () just kinda assumed that I would put them in there then commas inside.