Form and Data

focus310

Hello:

I have a form where I would like a person to go back to a page and modify it a field if they made a mistake. When I click the button to go back to the page, the information that was entered previously is all gone.

What can I do with my form so that the information entered will remain until the form is completed? I am using sessions. I thought that sessions remembers info. The data is passing correctly when I go forward with the form but the data disappears when I go back to a previous page.

Can someone help me out?
Thanks.

devinemke

a very simple example:

<?php
function form()
{
	extract($_POST);

echo '
<form action="" method="POST">
name: <input type="text" name="name" value="'; if (isset($name)) {echo $name;} echo '"><br>
email: <input type="text" name="email" value="'; if (isset($email)) {echo $email;} echo '"><br>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit">
</form>
';
}

if (!isset($_POST['submit']))
{
	form();
}
else
{
	$errors = array();

foreach ($_POST as $key => $value)
{
	$value = trim($value);
	$value = stripslashes($value);
	if ($value == '') {$errors[] = $key;}
	$_POST[$key] = $value;
}

if ($errors)
{
	echo 'you forgot to fill in the following fields: ' . implode(', ', $errors) . '<br><br>';
	form();
}
else
{
	echo 'thanks for fillimg out my form ' . $_POST['name'];
}	
}
?>

rebelo

Don't ask the person to go back. Instead, after validating the user input (or invalidating, as the case may be), display the form again with a message about what needs to be fixed and take a page from the rest of the internet by perhaps highlighting the bad field(s) for the user to fix. This way, you will have access to all of the posted data so you can re-populate the fields for the user.

focus310

Hi,

Basically, you are suggesting to let the person do the first pass in completing the form and then have them verify their information by redisplaying the form with the fields populated. They can go through the form and do a final submit if all is ok.

Correct?

With these questions, it is impossible to validate whether the input is good or bad. Most of the form is Yes/No or check boxes. One can accidentally click a checkbox they didn't want to but the data is still valid it's just wrong. Therefore, I can't highlight the field to be fixed because how would one know whether the checkbox is correct. Only the person who checks it knows and they may discover it later on during the form.

Weedpacket

The same principle still applies; since you're storing the submitted information in the session, then when you display the form you look to see if the corresponding session information exists. If it does, set the form fields appropriately as alluded to in devinemke's post (add 'checked="checked"' to checkboxes that are supposed to be checked, for example). Obviously you can't highlight the erroneous fields, but if the user has wanted to go back to the page to correct a mistake then presumably they already know that they made the mistake.