Creating online registration form

JaclynM

Hello,

I'm very new to PHP, and I have a question about something I'm working on. I'm the webmaster for a local organization that has a fall and a spring conference every year. People register by going to the website, printing out the registration form, and mailing it in to the treasurer with their payment. I was thinking of making an online registration form with PHP, which would e-mail the treasurer with all the info.

I got some PHP code from an aquaintance of mine, who used this form for an organization that she belongs to. I modified it to fit my particular organization, basing the fields on our previous (paper) registration forms. The code also uses JavaScript. (The person that I got the code from is very concerned about hiding e-mail addresses from spam bots, which is why the code is so long.) Right now I have my e-mail address set up as the one to receive registrations (just so I know that it's working). Assuming that my group approves of using online registrations, I would use our treasurer's e-mail address instead.

You can see the whole thing online at http://www.jmussehl.com/registrationform.html

This then takes you to http://www.jmussehl.com/submitted.php

You can see the code for the php document at http://www.jmussehl.com/submittedtext.html

One thing I had to account for is different registration costs. If you are a member, you pay $55, nonmembers pay $65, retirees pay $25 and students pay $25.

For this particular field, I gave the values names like "student25" in order to show both the registration type and the cost. But what I really wanted to do was have the registration type be one field (ie "student") and have the cost be a second field (ie "25.00").

So I created a code that would insert the correct cost, depending on the membership type the person chose.


if ($_REQUEST['regtype'] == "member55" )
{
$cost = '55.00';
}

else if ($_REQUEST['regtype'] == "nonmember65" )
{
$cost = '65.00';
}

else if ($_REQUEST['regtype'] == "unemployed25" )
{
$cost = '25.00';
}

else if ($_REQUEST['regtype'] == "student25" )
{
$cost = '25.00';
}

print $cost;

The reason I stuck that last bit of code in there (print $cost) was just to make sure that I had done everything correctly up until that point. This is why you'll see the cost at the very top of the submitted page, before the word "confirmation." I will remove that from the finished document.

Anyway, if you look at the confirmation page, with all the registrant's details (which is what gets sent to the treasurer via e-mail), the cost is blank. So every time I fill out this form, the server sends me an e-mail with all of the information, but nothing for the cost. I don't know what I did wrong. I e-mailed the person that I got the code from, and she thought it might be a problem with my using the wrong quotation marks or something. I've tried declaring the $cost variable with single quotes, double quotes, and no quotes, and that line is still always blank. Any suggestions?

planetsim

First things that come to mind as your Posting Data use $POST instead of $REQUEST, $_REQUEST can be Cookies, GET and POST. I managed to bypass your form and just use a querystring to get through it all and mind you not filled in correctly (maybe some validation such as numbers where numbers should be, valid email address etc).

For the code you posted use a Switch statement instead of using multiple elseif statements.

Im not sure why $cost isnt being outputted where it should be but its working for the hidden form you have.

Also try and be consistent you have <? then later on <?php you should be using <?php mainly because XML uses <? and PHP could get confused and try and interpret as XML.

leatherback

You ar e calling the variable $cost in a function. The nice thing about function is, that they do not know anything about the variables available in the rest of the script. (Scope of variables). The variables in the $_REQUEST array are available more generally then the normal variables, which is why you can use them. But you do not care why it doesn't work, but how it would work, I presume.

Replace:

function mailToRegistrar()

with

function mailToRegistrar($cost)

and further down:

mailToRegistrar();

with

mailToRegistrar($cost);

--
OR: you can after this line:

function mailToRegistrar()
{

place the line:

global $cost;

(Maybe with comma, not sure:
global, $cost😉

[edit]
And look at the comment Planet made about bypassing your form. It is a fairly real security risk, but requires a bit of studying to adjust for
[/edit]

JaclynM

Oh, I assumed that planetsim meant that he had been able to bypass my form, because of the fact that I had posted the code for everyone to see at http://www.jmussehl.com/submittedtext.html

Do you mean that you can bypass the form without knowing what the underlying PHP code is? Because if I end up using this for my organization's website, I would only show the form page and the confirmation page, so I didn't think there would be a way for users to see the PHP code.

leatherback

Hi,

Have a look here and decide for yourself..