form to email/passing variables

[cadams]

I want to develop a form to email script. The initial screen would have a drop-down list of about 6 items and fields to fill in personal information. The user fills in the personal information and selects one of the items. The user would then be taken to another page that has text area boxes, related to the previous selected item, that they could fill in. They might then be given the option to select another item and go through the process again.

Eventually, the form would be submitted, retaining all the personal information and choices that the user has made.

Are there some web tutorials or helpful sites that can give me some ideas on how to do this? I am somewhat familiar with variables and hidden fields, but I don't really know how to map this out.

Thanks for any help.

[bretticus]

Well, I'm sure there's an example of serializing data over multiple forms out there, but I'll let you find those.

For now I'll just explain some ways you might go about this. I assume you are familiar with passing POST or GET (form) variables to another script. I case you need a refresher:

PHP Manual on external variables.

As for the serialization, the easiest method is to store your user data as Session data:

Session Functions

IOW store your POST info in a SESSION variable:

$_SESSION['personal-info'] = $_POST['personal-info']

These variables are accessible throughout the users session. The con to this method is that a user's session will time out after a certain amount of time. This timeout can be set in php.ini or with the ini_set(). IOW, if a user takes too long between page loads, his Session data can be lost.

To avoid the data-lost scenario above, you could store POST data from a previous form in hidden input tags from the current form to be passed on to the next in the same manner.