best design for navigation?

dumbass

Hello all,

I'm getting back to coding after some time away, I use to write applications in coldfusion and asp, etc, and now I'm building a few websites using php - yippie...

I'd like to use an index page thru which to pass and process all user requests, then piece together all the necessary html parts to display the appropriate response.

My questions are:

What would be the best means to code site navigation? Should I store the navigation info in session variables? or should I pass it thru forms and url variables?
Can anyone point me to examples of code to pass and parse session variables? and or same for form/url variables?
Can anyone point me to tutorials on php application planning/structuring?

Thanks! d.a.

Weedpacket

1) The session would be cleaner - less traffic, more capacity, less chance of corruption client-side, and displayed links would be more stable.
2) Covered in the manual in its chapter on [man]session[/man] functions.
3) The FAQs in the Coding and General Help forums have some links that should help you with this.

dumbass

Thanks! Any quick help on the syntax for setting a $_SESSION variable when a user clicks on a link?

cheers!

Trs2988

Sessions are pretty simple to use.

Somewhere at the top of the page(s) where you'll be using sessions, call session_start(). The reason that you need to do it before the top of the page is because it's like header() - you have to call it before you send any output.
To set a session variable, just use the following syntax:

$_SESSION['variable'] = "value";

3. And then you can reference $_SESSION['variable'] on any page that uses sessions. Of course, you may want to use empty() first to make sure that $_SESSION['variable'] actually has something in it. Otherwise, your script will throw a warning.

Ok, so maybe it's not as simple as I said. But it's not too bad.

dumbass

Cool, thanks for the replies!

For navigation using hyperlinks, do I have to assign the session variable in the URL, like <a href="index.php?$_SESSION['variable']='1'>next page</a>, or can I do this in the onClick property of the <a> tag?

I suppose I could test this myself, so sorry if this thread is getting annoying, but if anyone can help me here, it would save me a lot of time. I'm actually surprised not to have found more examples like this floating around...

Thanks again! d.a.

dumbass

Ahh, I sort of figured it out, I can just do this:

<a href="index.php" onClick"<?php $_SESSION['action'] = 1; ?>">click here</a>

This syntax works, any comments?

Also, being that index.php is the first page visited, how should I initialize $SESSION['action']? I should check if $SESSION['action'] exists (meaning index.php is being reloaded, called from a link in the site) and if it doesn't exist, create it and initialize it to empty?

Thanks!!! d.a.

Trs2988

I'm not sure you really understand the concept of sessions, or maybe the concept of PHP. Sessions has nothing to do with the link that you send the user to, and the onClick event is purely for JavaScript. JS is a client-side language, so I guess you could use it to send them places. But PHP is completely server-side. All the code resides on the server.

What you would normally do with sessions, would be... let's say you have that page, index.php. You might have a page to index.php?step=2, and on that page you would set $SESSION['step'] = $GET['step']; Then you would know that they were on page two.

Personally - I've never used sessions for this type of navigation. I've always felt it easier just to include steps or actions in the query string, and let people navigate around like that. I can understand times where you would need to do session variables for navigation, but I think your case is simple enough to just use GET. Research session and get variables and find out which one would be better for what you're trying to do.