Can 2 forms coexist on the same page?

[offseri]

Hi all!

Need your help again .. I have 2 forms on a single page both processed by separate php code. The forms are somewhat independent: the first form is simply a question with several radio buttons and a submit button whose action is to change the question every time its clicked (question is pulled from a local database in sequential order by id).

Form2 is a select box:

<form action="samepage.php" method="POST">
<select name="results">
<option value="0" onClick="this.form.submit()">Everyone
<option value="1" onClick="this.form.submit()">Males only
<option value="2" onClick="this.form.submit()">Females only
</select>
</form>
<? more php code here ?>

The user has already identified as a male or female on a previous page so thats not a concern. Problem I have is any action on form2 submits the page and the code in form1 gets executed ...meaning the question changes. I can see why - basically page starts all over again when it hitis the "this.form.submit()" but I dont know how to fix that 😕 ??
Thanks for any help!

[justsomeone]

The code which any form will call is specified in the "action" tag on the form. In your case, this is samepage.php. I'm guessing that the file which contains the forms, the file which should process form1 and the file which should process form 2 are all the same. In order for this to work, that file needs to understand how it is being called. One way of doing this is to have the code search for form-specific fields. For example:

if (isset($_POST["results"]){
    // process form 2
}

if (isset($_POST["form1field"]){
    // process form 1
}

This can get messy though. A more straightforward approach might be to have each form call a separate action (eg "f1handler.php", "f2handler.php") which silently process that form's input and then redirects back to the main page. While it may look more complicated, I find this solution more elegant, as it allows you to maintain single files for single tasks.