form sort thru php

buzzby

is there a way of using php to sort the fields of the form so they go into the right mysql field. the problem i get is that i list the fields in the mysql but the results displayed dont match the field names. is this a common occurance? is there a way of combating this at all?

devinemke

your question is a bit vague. you are pulling records out of a database and displaying them and the fields don't match up with the values? not knowing anything about your data structure, here is a basic example:

// assuming already connected to db

$result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM table');
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc ($result))
{
	foreach ($row as $key => $value)
	{
		echo $key . ' = ' . $value . '<br>';
	}
	echo '<br><br>';
}

buzzby

sorry for being vague, i have this problem. all the results go into the database fine. i have checkboxes and radio button info that i want to show. now what i have trouble with is this:

if a have a question with 3 possible answers, the user can select all or any. when the user is presented with radio buttons then the user can only select 1 answer. the tricky bit is this. i have a viewdb.php whereby i can view what the user has filed in. what i want to be able to see is what answers the user has selected whether it be a readio button or checkbox(es) against the actual question itself. so if i ask a question like: how many brothers do you have? and the selection is 1, 2, 3, 4, or more then there would be 5 checkboxes. how would i display the result so i could see the question (or the text that relates to the question since it would be a column header) and the result. how different would this be for radio buttons? if i had a question like: what colour are your eyes? 3 possible answers. black, brown, blue. how do i get the result in the viewdb.php file to show that i have chosen blue as the answer?.

what all this boils down to is this. i want to be able to display the answers in table form by pulling the answers from the database and placing them in a table.

devinemke

are the questions and the possible answers already stored in the database? if so, what is the data structure? you should use checkboxes if multiple answers are allowed and use radios if only one answer is allowed. post an example of what you have so far.

buzzby

http://www.buildingdoctors.co.uk/tester/phpdatabase.txt

is the actual form code and

http://www.buildingdoctors.co.uk/tester/viewdb.txt

is the actual table the pulls out the answers from the database that houses the answers sent via the phpdatabase.txt form

try fillin out the form here and viewing the results here

mourisj

If you submit data from a checkbox , you have to retrieve it as an array

I once had developed some tool where one object could have one or more successors. In the form to submit, the checkboxes were defined like:

echo " <TD><INPUT type=\"checkbox\" name=\"succ_id[]\" value=\"$suc_row[o_id]\"></TD>\n";

The data were treated by the server with the following code (which is probably not the nicest one, but at that time, it worked fine for me):

$i = 0;
$count = 0;
while ($succ_id[$i]) {

//build artificial variable names
$con_name = "con" . $succ_id[$i]; $con_ann = "c_ann" . $succ_id[$i];

//submit
$result = mysql_query("insert into pre_succ values ('$pred', '$succ_id[$i]', '${$con_name}', '${$con_ann}')");
$i++;

if ($result == 0) {

include("../subm_fail.inc"); //error

}

else {

$count++;

}
}

echo "<P>$count lines successfully submitted</P>";

When finishing successfully, I was told the number of successors inserted; this helped me in a first step to watch if the code was working as expected.

For checkboxes, you should not have any trouble, as there is only one value submitted.

Have a nice day

JJ Mouris

buzzby

that code indeed does look real ugly and hard to follow. trouble i have is this. to read the value of a checkbox is fine because each checkbox is individual and has its own value. so to pull the checkbox out of a database isnt as much trouble as a radio button. for a radio button to work they must have the same name so that only one can be selected. but when one is selected how do i know what has been filled in when i try to display the results. if the choice is 'red', 'yellow', 'pink' or 'green' the radio button just chooses one. how do i know what has been chosen if the radion button value is '1'. can i have the radio button value be 'blue' or 'red' or 'green'. that way when the results are viewed, the right value is shown when displaying the results of a radio button

mourisj

I revisited my code: It was not only a matter of an simple array (the checkboxes), but each array-element ahd several additional text-fields associated (free-text user input) which I had to manage in some way. That's why this code is that unreadable.

Back to your purpose:

Checkboxes are not necessarely individual values: in your example, I would have used one field name for everything in "project" (same for other parts of your form). The values would be sent as an array.

There is no particular trouble for radio-buttons as well. There are even several ways to handle this:
Either you use the same name for the "button value" than for the label:

<input type="radio" name="color" value="green"> Green
<input type="radio" name="color" value="blue"> Blue
etc.

you insert these values into your DB, and you retrieve them later, so things are trivial.

Or you use codes for your items :
<input type="radio" name="color" value="1"> Green
<input type="radio" name="color" value="2"> Blue
etc.

You then have again to ways to manage:

Either your DB "knows" about the codes:
create table colors (
color_id int,
color varchar(20) )

Or it is your code that knows about the colors:
switch ($color_val) {
case 1:
do_green();
break;
case 2:
do_blue();
break;
default:
do_random_color();
}

If your DB handles the codes, it is easy to manage adding color-codes lateron.
If your code handels the color-codes, you have to change your code every time you want to add a color, and you hav to change in every place you use these color-codes.

Hope this helps

JJ Mouris