Survey form processing

EricTRocks

Hey,

I am writing a survey system that has dynamically created form fields. There are going to be tons of questions in the system and on each survey. I need to know a way to automatically gather the answers from the $_POST variables and insert them into the mySQL database.

Since the html form is dynamically created I can't hard code the script to look for specific fields as the field names will be changing for each different survey. The question and possible answers are stored in seperate tables in the database.

Any help / suggestiosn would be appreciated.

Thanks
Eric T>

kburger

I'm not sure there's enough to go on here. Are you saying that your form handler is not going to know beforehand what the form fields will be named? If that's the case, how are you going to put those values into a database? Hopefully I've misunderstood you. Just taking whatever happens to be in the $_POST array and inserting that stuff into a database is obviously leaving yourself wide open to all sorts of nasty stuff.

You say that the form fields will be changing for each survey. Just make sure you pass the survey number, or whatever, along in the form. Then the form handler will know what fields to expect. Am I missing something?

EricTRocks

Sorry if it was confusing. Yes you did understand right.

What the system is doing, is that it gets the survey id # from a $_GET variable, then it queries the questions, subquestions, and answers and subqanswers tables to get the questions and answers for survey.

The names of the fields are usually going to be the question id and subquestion id numbers put together with the question name as well (1.1 This is question 1, 1.2 This is question 2, etc). I was going to explode that into seperate parts to put it in different fields of the answers table in the database.

I have to write it so the system is easily usuable from the backend and by people who don't know HTML or PHP, thus why the system is really dynamic and can create the questions for the backend users with them knowing any coding.

This might be the down fall however since the survey system (form handler) must be able to know what field names from the form are and post them to the database.

Should I think about making another part of the system that creates the actual form handler as well and queries the tables in the db for all the questions that are in each particular survey and then outputs a form handler file specifically for that survey??