[RESOLVED] Passing on variable to successive forms

kiwibrit

A form on the company site that at present relies on a triple-dependent drop-down, javascript-driven selection. Quite neat, but not accessibility-friendly. So I am switching to a 3-stage process:

Stage 1 a simple html form which triggers a php form file- say page1.php which offers the next choices, which in turn triggers a second file - say page2.php - which finds out a further choice so that an output can be derived to make the desired MySQL query .

Problem is the query requires the named selections from each stage in the process, something like:

$query = "SELECT * FROM $produce$type$variant";

In the javascript form, all names were shot off at one go. At the moment I am suffering a brain-block - how can I preserve the selection names made at the early stages to feed into the MySQL selection combination?

Rodney_H_

You could use a cookie or session, or if you input it into a db, you could access it from there... You could even create a text file/log, and write the info to that file and grab it from there. You have several options.... It depends on security, your needs, and convenience/time.... 😃

kiwibrit

I think I'll have to go for sessions. Thanks for chewing that over with me.

Rodney_H_

No problem. Don't forget to mark this thread resolved: Thread tools (top right)

LHBandit

I've just started with PHP, and in one of my scripts I've had to carry over user input from page to page. To do this I outputted the input from the previous page as hidden input fields like this:

<?php
foreach($_POST as $key=>$value) {
  echo '<input type="hidden" name="' . $key . '" value="' . $value . '">' . "\n";
}
?>

Would something like this be acceptable? I'm just curious as I see you've mentioned using sessions or cookies to do this and am wondering why someone would want to use one or the other.

kiwibrit

I'm very new to php, too, LHBandit. I don't know enough, yet, to comment on what you have done. But so far as cookies and sessions are concerned, I am not to keen on cookies, as I understand with modern browsers up to 30% of viewers will not handle client-side cookies as I would like for my project, because of security settings. Whereas sessions handle every thing server-side. Also seems less intrusive.

But I also wonder if you might not have been better off starting a new thread, x-referenced to this - as this one has been marked resolved?