Dealing with cached values for forms.

Squiggles

Hi all.

I came across this problem regarding the stored usernames and passwords feature of firefox. Whenever I made a field that had the same name as another field from a different page, if it is from the same server it retrieves the values from one page, and stores displays it on the field of the same name of a different page. This becomes dangerous, because other people will now know the saved username and passwords of other accounts.

Is it possible to control the storing and displaying of usernames and passwords from saved list of the different browsers using PHP?

Much thanks in advance.

chads2k2

Good question,

However it doesn't have any merit. I am 99% sure that I am right about this but if not then both of us will learn something. If I were in your shoes I would not worry about the forms because the user is accepting that by saving the data it will be available by anyone who is using the computer. Now different browsers will not give data from other sessions. Unless you are storing the data in a funky way that allows the browser to choose what data set is theirs (which is virtually impossible).

Now, try and keep all your form names different. What I typically do is name the form something like "userinfo" and then every field name has "userinfo_name", "userinfo_address", "userinfo_address2" ... ect. That way no form will ever have the same name as another. It really goes back to information architecture.

Good luck,
Chad R. Smith
Director of Web Development for 50 Marketing
www.50marketing.com

Squiggles

Thanks for the answer, Chad, but my concern is more of a workaround syntax, not practice. I know it is a good rule to always have unique form field names for each form that is used on a page, but, as it is, even we have problems keeping track of changes, especially if the infrastructure is already there.

Anyway, I'm still looking for other answers. Any other thoughts on this?

_RL_Ian

It's a client side application that rembers the url, username and password fields, there's nothing you can do on the server side except rename your field names to trick the browser.