Coding for a submit button

James0816

Can someone tell me exactly how do you program for a submit button? I mean I know how to add a button to my pages and such, just don't know where to put the PHP code for such things as Delete, Adds, Updates. I guess it's not too bad if you only have one button on the page. But when you have three buttons, to me, I can't figure it out.

Thx

dp777

in your html name your submit button and any other buttons. You can then reference them in PHP through POST

example:
<input type="submit" name="new">
<input type="reset" name="clear">

in the processing area
if($POST['new']){
//do some stuff
}elseif($POST['clear']){
//do different stuff.
}

HTH!

James0816

Are button only linked to forms or can they be used outside of a form? The reason that I ask is that after clicking within a form, it resets the page and executes code that I only want to execute once after the page is originally loaded.

nemonoman

<input type=submit...
is linked to its enclosing form.

You can have many different submit buttons within a form, but all will have the characteristic of (1) calling the page referenced in the form's action= attribute and (2) POSTING or GETTING the variables shown in the form, depending on whether the form's method= value is POST or GET

Submit buttons outside forms have undefined behavior.

You can also create
<input type=button

Buttons (as opposed to submits) are used primarily to run javascripts using the onclick= attribute to call javascript.

You probably want to build a check in the the PHP that builds the page...

if($submitbutton){
//don't do initial page processing
}
else{
//DO initial page processing
}

dp777

If I understand your question correctly... In order to get a button value passed through POST then it has to be by clicking it through a form. The form action method=POST is what is going to happen when a button is clicked for the form. Buttons that are not click are not going to have a value you passed through. I'm not sure how you would pass a button value through with having it clicked, if it is possible at all it is above my knowledge level. You might just want to try setting yourself up a simple html form and echoing out submit values and such on action and just playing around with it and seeing which way will work best for you process. If you don't want the page to be completely reset, you can just reload it with the values. Just have the action be a PHP_SELF call and at the top of the name space put in your $_POST to get the variable submitted and in your input tags set the value = $variableName that way if there is nothing there the input form will still be blank but after one process is run it will still be loaded. Hopefully that helps!

James0816

I have been playing with this but for some reason it will not work. I think it may have something to do with the "action" parameter. correct? If so, how do you get the page to reload with the the updated data?

I have moved the php code in front of both the </table> and </form> tags as well and still nothing.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>Test Update Page</title>
<?php
mysql_connect("localhost", "<id>", "<pw>") or die("Failure to communicate with database");
mysql_select_db("<db>");
$query = "SELECT name, city, st from <db> where name='Bob'";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$parr=mysql_fetch_array($result);
?>
</head>

</body>

</html>

<?php if (false) { ?><?php } ?>

dreamteam

i am new with php, but i just send the stuff to another page and deal with it there, like when i ahve edits, in action i send it to edit.php and in that page i run the sql query to update.