Question on opinion

CodeDogg

I just have a picky question to ask.

If you have a user go though, say, an inventory or bunch of search results, I have found that it's a good idea to use $_GET variables. This way the user is able to copy and paste the link to save and get back to the page that he or she was once at. If you use session variables, on the other hand, the user must start back at the beginning and try to remember the path that was taken to the page that he or she wanted to keep.

The thing is though, there are some pages that may have many links to self. For example, if you want to go to the next page on a search result, you reference the same page you are on and set the proper page $GET variable to the next page. I often have trouble keeping all of these variables in order. Let's say that you want to reorder the search results into ascending order, if you forget to put the ordering variables in the links that go to the next page, then the reordering will be lost.

Has anyone found an easy way to say organized here?

bretticus

Certainly!

Using the URL to pass an id to a details page is pretty common. When passing, next page, or other options to the current page, I wrote a function to help me keep things straight.

/**
	 * Append a querystring pair to the current querystring an ensure no duplicate keys.
	 *
	 * @param string $key
	 * @param string $value
	 * @return string
	 */
	function appendToQueryString($key, $value)
	{
		$querystring = "";
		$querypairs = $_GET;
		$querypairs[$key] = $value;
		foreach ($querypairs as $k => $v) {
			$querystring .= "&$k=$v";
		}
		return (!empty($querystring)) ? "?" . substr($querystring, 1) : "";
	}

It's used in the following manner

echo "<a href=\"{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}" . appendToQueryString("page", $page) . "\">[page $page]</a>";

CodeDogg

Thank you. That's great. That's exactly what I was looking for.

bretticus

return (!empty($querystring)) ? "?" . substr($querystring, 1) : "";

I think this function may have morphed. There is no need for the conditional above as a GET key and value pair are required for function inputs. Not sure what I was thinking 😃

return "?" . substr($querystring, 1);

will suffice for every condition.

bretticus

Wow, in fact, I was using this particular function for passing url values for numeric ids and one-word strings (it seems I write the same functions over and over. I need a common base class.) Anyways, to make this function better for public use, you may wanna slightly ammend it further.

/**
     * Append a querystring pair to the current querystring and ensure no duplicate keys.
     *
     * @param string $key
     * @param string $value
     * @return string
     */
    function appendToQueryString($key, $value)
    {
        $querystring = "";
        $querypairs = $_GET;
        $querypairs[$key] = $value;
        foreach ($querypairs as $k => $v) {
            $querystring .= "&$k=" . urlencode($v);
        }
        return "?" . substr($querystring, 1);
    }