remember from one page to another

fiberknee

I am fairly new to php. I wanted to set up a basic thought. I want to set up form element on one page, like a product, then send the selected info to a second page. How do I set up the php script to remember through that process.

I don't know php terminology so this might sound stupid but any help will help me learn.

thanks
tim

bpat1434

Well, if you're POSTing information from the form to the PHP script (i.e. the user clicks submit and the php script then loads) then it's just a matter of calling the global variable "$_POST".

If you want to save the form information from the receiving php script to another page, use sessions or cookies.

Basic example:

<form action="test.php" method="post">
Name: <input type="text" name="name"><br>
<input type="submit" name="enter" value="Submit">
</form>

test.php

<?php
echo 'Your name is <b>'.$_POST['name'].'</b>';
?>

fiberknee

Okay, so what if I then want that to be apart of a new form. That more info is typed in then submitted through email.

Does that make sense?

Thanks again...

tim

swatisonee

You want someone to send you an email and then have the contents of that email move into a mysql table? Or you want to create a form that can be submitted back to you and its contents transferred to a mysql table ?

bpat1434

Where did mySQL come into this? I don't remember ever seeing mySQL as part of it....

Well, if you want to pass it through extra forms, do something like this on subsequent forms, loop through the $_POST array and add the var=>val pairs as hidden elements in the next form....

<?php

foreach($_POST as $var=>$val)
{
  if($var != 'Submit'){
    echo '<input type="hidden" name="'.$var.'" value="'.$val.'">';
  }
}

fiberknee

Okay so if I get this right...

If I use what you just suggested, then the click submit takes me to a second form where I can capture the info from page one through $val

is that what you meant?
Thanks, tim

bpat1434

No, you capture the submitted information in the $_POST array... you loop through that array and using $var=>$val pairs, you assign hidden fields the name of $var and a value of $val...

Take this as an example:

<form action="proc1.php" method="post">
Name: <input type="text" name="name"><br>
Age: <input type="text" name="age"><br>
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Next Step">

proc1.php

<?php
$hidden = '';

foreach($_POST as $var=>$val)
{
  if($var != 'Submit')
  {
    $hidden .= '<input type="hidden" name="'.$var.'" value="'.$val.'">';
  }
}

echo '<form action="proc2.php" method="post">
Height: <input type="text" name="feet"> feet <input type="text" name="inches"> inches<br>'.$hidden.'
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Finish">';
?>

proc2.php

<?php

echo 'Your name is <b>'.$_POST['name'].'</b> and you are <i>'.$_POST['age'].'</i> year(s) old.  You claim that you are <i>'.$_POST['feet'].'\' '.$_POST['inches'].'"</i> tall, but I know better...';
?>

If you started at the first form, and filled everything out, you'd get this output:

Your name is Brett and you are 22 year(s) old. You claim that you are 5' 8" tall, but I know better....

fiberknee

Brett, That is it exactly. Thank you!

tim

dalecosp

Now, I don't want to make a newbie's head spin, but the next step is using either cookies or sessions to do something similar. If you don't wish to keep passing around a bunch of data (for example, every page on this site knows that I'm 'dalecosp' ... but it's not passing it around with hidden form fields, because I'm not always submitting a form), then you either have PHP write the data into a cookie (on the web surfer's machine ('clientside')) or save it in the $_SESSION array (where it writes the info down on the server and generally uses a cookie to simply know which session file goes with which client). It's really pretty simple to understand, and is the logical "next step" once you've learned to pass data through one or two forms....

Hope your head's not spinning... 😉

fiberknee

Okay so a question. What do I need to think about when it comes to security of something like this? I guess keywords to research.

Thanks again.

bpat1434

Well, not a whole lot actually. Unless you do something with the posted information (like email or database injection) there's not a whole lot the user can do. Obviously watch using things like eval() and other php root functions on un-verified input from anybody. You'll want to clean the input no-matter what.

When doing an email, you'll want to validate that it's one email address, not 50, and validate their body text so they don't try and send an HTML message as SPAM from your site.

Basically, no more security than regular, except the user can see what is moving from page 1 to page 3 on page 2 (if that makes sense). But they won't necessarily see it unless they look for it...

Sessions are more secure for actually passing the data from page-to-page; however, it's not necessary for basic stuff. And sessions too, are only as secure as you make them.