Newbie to PHP from ASP

[RichardGrant]

Hello,

I come from ASP/ASP.NET, have read some PHP, and liked the extense libraries it has built in, and the functionality the PHP provides.
Now, APS.NET has the ViewState functionality. It's basically a hidden field on the page, which saves the values, and some state info of all controls, and restores the values, and state after a trip to the server.
ViewState is more complex than that, it has encryption for the data it stores, etc.

Is there a way to do that in PHP? How?

Thanks in advance,

Rick

[NogDog]

There is no "magic" built-in function in PHP to do that. Depending on how your application is structured, you can either save form data to [man]session[/man] data, then if it exists grab it from there to pre-fill the form; or if using a single page for both form display and processing, just grab the values from the $GET or $POST array, as applicable, e.g.:

<input type='text' name='example' value='<?php
if(isset($_POST['example']))
{
   echo htmlentities($_POST['example'], ENT_QUOTES);
}
?>' size='20' maxlength='20'>

And of course you could put that into a function to minimize the typing (and typos).

I suspect there are some 3rd party classes/functions out there for HTML form handling that may automate that sort of thing, but I haven't bothered to look for any, myself.