Passing variable value after button pressed

kcgame

Hi,
I have encountered a problem with the variable, $inactives. It can correctly output what i want before delete button was pressed, but whenever the delete is pressed, $inactives will not print out successfully (it display nothing on screen 🙁 )

How can i make it that the value inside $inactives is passed after delete button was pressed? Below is a simplified source code of the problem area. Any help/comment is apprieciated. Thanks.

<?

// user presses the delete inactives button
  if(isset($_POST[delinactive])) {
  // the following echo statement did'nt print out '1'	
   echo"<br>$inactives";

  }

echo"<form name=formp method=post action=Politics.php>";


// Display inactives' details
$inactives=0; 

// some code here
$inactives++;

// the below echo statement prints out '1'
echo"<br>$inactives";

// the following checkbox has other purposes
echo"<input name=$inactives type=checkbox value=1>";	
echo"<input type=Submit name=delinactive value=Delete>";
echo"</form>";
?>

bretticus

According to your code, you start with an empty variable, then you set it to 0 then you increment it. Finally, you make the hidden field's name the incremented variable. After your POST, you're trying to print out the value of an empty variable again. This is what your posted code indicates. You say your code is simplified, so I'll assume I don't have the big picture here.

Anyways, despite the limited information you've shared, I will guess that all you need to do is try substituting a line:

echo"<input name=inactives type=checkbox value=$inactives>";

// and ...

echo"<br>{$_POST['inactives']}";

If this is way off, please be more specific.

kcgame

Thanks for the prompt response, maybe the checkbox is a bit confusing to be there. Please ignore the checkbox HTML tag.

My objective is to after i press "Delete" button, it will print out '1'. But it is now not the case, hope it clarify the doubt.

bretticus

Okay, I see what this issue is a bit clearer now. I think what the problem here is that you simply have a misunderstanding about how to serialize a variable value over a new page load. In other words, HTTP is a stateless protocol by nature. It will make sense to remember that HTML was never intended to produce content programatically. Web programming languages such as PHP were written around HTTP, not vice-versa. With that in mind, please observe that each time you load a webpage with PHP code, you are starting the script over from scratch. This means, if I set a variable in my script, on subsequent page loads, that value is reinitialized (not saved.) Serialization just means that some variable value or object is maintained over different states. Presently there are only a few ways to do this. To keep my response shorter, what you want to do is "pass" your variable from one HTML page to another. In other words, in your case, you HAVE TO embed your variable as a form input value so that you can retrieve the value in the next pageload.