Checking WHICH checkboxes are checked

Toadums

Hey. SO i have an html form that has about 15 checkboxes on it...I know it would be easy to just name each checkbox its own name (check1, check2 etc) but that would be kind of tedious...

right now I have it like: <input type="checkbox" name="Descr[]" value="Breakfast" /> (of course the value is different in each one), but the name is the same..

i know how to go thru the boxes...but like...is there a way to assign 'breakfast' to a certain spot in the array?

ie. $Descr[1] = breakfast
$Descrt[2] = Lunch

where lunch and breakfast are the value ="" field?

This is what I have so far...all it does is goes thru them and adds all the checked boxes to the string:

if(isset($_POST['Add'])){

if(isset($POST["Descr"])) {
$Descr = $POST["Descr"];
} else {
$Descr=array();
}

for ($i="0"; $i<count($Descr); $i++) {

if($Descr[$i] != null){

$q=$q.$Descr[$i].", ";

}
}

echo substr($q,0,strlen($q)-2);

}
?>

Which is good for when I need to do my sql query...but for now I just need to check which ones are checked, and if they are checked perform an operation.

any help would be great.
Thanks,
Paul

dagon

non checked boxes won't be in the $_POST["Descr"] array

Toadums

dagon;10916384 wrote:
non checked boxes won't be in the $_POST["Descr"] array

hmm..I guess I didnt ask my question right >.< lol..

I understand that the array will only contain checked boxes...But what I want is..like...a way to say if breakfast is checked...i guess the only way to do this is to give each box a different name...like i said, tedious >.< lol..

Thanks for the reply
Paul

dagon

if you only need the values, you can just loop through the array to get all the checked values, but im not really sure what you want.

foreach($_POST["Descr"]  as $food){
echo $food;
}

will output the values of the checked boxes.

bradgrafelman

You could also use [man]array_search/man to see if "breakfast" was returned in the $_POST['Descr'] array, which I believe is what you're asking.

If you provide a little more information about the implementation however (e.g. what you would do with the knowledge of whether or not "breakfast" was checked), we might be able to suggest a better way to go about it.

Toadums

Oh! that should work!

There may be an easier way to go about this...but basically what I am doing:

I have an expense sheet for my work (so like when people go away for meetings, how much of it is covered (ie. 22$ for breakfast, 24 for lunch, 29 for dinner...etc, then there are other expenses [gas, hotels, and more 😛])

So right now i have a form with 14 checkboxes. What I need is that when a button is clicked, it scans thru all the boxes to check if they are checked (i was just going to do if(isset($_POST['breakfast'] ..or what ever name they have.. for all of them)

So if a box is checked, it will add how ever much to the grand total (for the meal ones, it is a set value, but things like gas, the person will enter a value in a text box, and that will be added). also, they will be added to a long string to go into my sql database that holds the values of which boxes are checked.

Maybe there is a better way of doing this too..?
I was just going to go ...under the description field of my database, like: "breakfast, dinner, ferry" and just have something like that for every single entry...but that seems kinda inefficient...would it maybe be better to have 14 fields for each one in my database with a boolean value? because in the way I have it right now, I cant think of how I will be able to "report" the values...like on the display screen...?

Is it possible to avoid using the 'check check boxes' button that I have...? it would be great if it was just like "if box is checked, add $xx.xx, if it is unchecked remove $xx.xx...?" I know there is like onFocus/onclick...but those never seem to work for me...and can you only use them if you use javascript?

Thanks...sorry that this post is sort of all over the place 😛 if you need any clarification, let me know

bradgrafelman

For the DB, I might design the table like so:

AUTO_INCREMENT column to reference each individual expense
FOREIGN KEY'd column to reference a specific expense report
FOREIGN KEY'd column to reference an expense type (e.g. breakfast, gas, hotel, etc. - you'd have these in a separate "lookup" table consisting of a PRIMARY KEY for an id {that's what we're referencing here} as well as a VARCHAR description)
The (dollar) amount of the expense

That might not be the best design, but with database normalization and whatnot it seemed like the logical schema choice to me (though I'm no DB guru!). Sorry if I didn't explain it very well; I don't have many GUI tools to build the relational schema I have in my head (though I'll accept advice from anyone for such an application 🙂).

As for the total, why do you care whether or not they had breakfast? Do you penalize them for not eating breakfast at the company's expense? If not, it sounds like all you care about is what they do report; anything unchecked doesn't contribute (positively or negatively) to the total amount, so you shouldn't need to know which items weren't check.

If the above description and database design doesn't apply, however, and you absolutely must know whether or not they ate breakfast and are reporting it as an expense, you could instead use radio buttons for each item on the expense report; that way you can go down the list and have a definitely yes/no answer submitted for each item. Again, with my suggested DB design above, however, you could easily query the DB for each report to find the total amount as well as which expense items weren't recorded (and it's obvious that by deduction you could then tell which ones weren't reported).

scrupul0us

forgive me for saying this, but this seems to be overkill for what you are trying to accomplish

a simple excel spreadsheet is all you need

Toadums

first @ Scrupulous: the way that my uncle (and boss) has been doing it since he started the company was via a spreadsheet...im not sure why, but now he wants like everything to be in databases 😛 It may be harder to make...but yeah...its what he wants 😛 I think it is just that they are tired of sending stuff back and forth (send the expense sheet to the employee, they fill it out and then they send it back and it manually gets added to Excel)...but im not 100% sure. Thanks for the suggestion tho 🙂

@. ok that will totally work!! but what I meant by remove was...say they HAD breakfast checked, and they hit the submit button....and then they remembered they didnt have breakfast, and unchecked the breakfast..i would need it to remove the 22$...or i could just make it a 1 stop deal...only one button (the submit button) ... but that brings me back to my next question.

is there a way to make the checkboxes do something before a button is hit? like onclick or "on check" or something..? i just really can never get onclick to work, I dont know why lol..!

edit: btw brad. now that i re look over what you posted...I dont think I understand 1. and 2. ... I get that the expense table would have an auto incrememnt key (it already does) but what is the foreign key under it for??

Thanks for your time

bradgrafelman

Toadums wrote:
say they HAD breakfast checked, and they hit the submit button....and then they remembered they didnt have breakfast, and unchecked the breakfast

Sounds like you'd have to complicate things a little more than a simple submit form; you'd want to implement some way they could go back and edit previously submitted entries.

If you're doing a dynamic total on the HTML page itself, yes, you could use the 'onclick' attribute to fire off a Javascript event (this.checked inside that attribute would return a true/false depending upon the state of the checkbox after they clicked it) and update the total displayed accordingly.

Toadums wrote:
I dont think I understand 1. and 2. ... I get that the expense table would have an auto incrememnt key (it already does) but what is the foreign key under it for??

I don't know how much information you gather from each expense report, but I figured that other than the variable data (e.g. the expense items), there's certain information standard to each report, such as the person's name, perhaps the date that the expenses were incurred on, possibly even a title/description/reason for the expenses.

I was suggesting that you'd split this data up into two tables; one table would hold this standard information, while another table would hold all of the individual expenses for that report. To link the one single row in the "main" table (e.g. the one that holds the date, name, etc.) to the multiple rows in the table holding the actual items, you'd need some unique value from the main table to be inserted with every row in the items table.

I don't know how much you know about relational databases, but it's basically a link between the one-to-many relationship that allows you to SELECT all the rows in the items table given a specific expense report. Using DB features such as foreign keys, it simply provides a more defined relationship for the DBMS. I'm sure a tutorial could explain it better, but one such feature that might be relevant here is if you were to DELETE an expense report in this setup, all you would have to do is DELETE the single row in the "main" table and the DBMS would automagically know to "CASCADE" the delete operation and delete the multiple rows in the items table that correspond to the given expense report.

It may seem like overkill, but I'm just laying out one possible method you could go about doing it. I assumed that since you were upgrading from the disjoint "spreadsheet" method to using a relational database software that you (and/or subsequently your boss) wanted a more professional, manageable solution - two adjectives that any programmer might immediately translate into "complex." :p

There's certainly no rule that says you have to go about it in this way; you could simply create one table with many columns and be done with it.

Toadums

bradgrafelman;10916508 wrote:
I'm sure a tutorial could explain it better,

Thanks you for this post! When I started doing all this database stuff (I started in Access about a month and a half ago)...I read up on a few things with databases (normalization/front/backend, and a couple others) ... but I never read about relational databases. Although I did ask some questions on some forums 😛 So my database already was ... kind of relational, except now I know about keys and stuff 😛

Right now how it is is like this: There is the main table with the fields:

Name
Date
ProjectID(foreign key)
Description(foreign key)
GrossAmount
GST (government sales tax, not sure if you have that where you live)
Total
Invoiced
Billable
ExpenseID(primary key)

The ProjectID will pull the Client (who to charge expense to) and Project Name off pdem_projects.tblProjects

Now I think I have an idea, after reading your posts and articles on relational databases, of what I am going to do with the Description. I think I am going to leave the "calculate" button on the form...and then if people want to remove breakfast, they just hit the calculate button again and it restarts/recalculates the Total price, instead of trying to subract and crap. Then I will have a foreach loop that loops thru the $Descr array and takes all the values out of it runs a query off of those values to the pdem_expenses.tblMinistryExpenses (this table holds the info on how much of breakfast, lunch etc is expense-able)

Then instead of making a box on my Expense table for each of the expense-able things, I will just (with the foreach loop) create a string that will be stored in the Descriptions box...which is how I originally planned this, because I figure once a person hits the "add expense sheet" button, they wont be wanting to change it.

I think that sounds atleast fairly efficient, hehe... and not too complex. it will get the job done!

But if you read all this, and see any blarring errors, do let me know 😛