Pop-Up question with some PHP thrown in

[latguy]

OK, here is what I am trying to do....

1. User enters a phone number on the main page
2. This is handed off to a handler that looks up the phone number in the database
3. If there is more than 1 phone number found, then they are confronted with a pop-up window that asks which customer record they want.
4. once they select a customer, then the pop-up hands off that info to the main webpage that sent them there to begin with.

How is this accomplished? I see it done all the time, I have never had a need for it until now.

I am not looking for a complete solution, just someone to point me in the right direction, such as what i need to look into, problems I should think about and the like.

thanks in advance for any info. 🙂

[johanafm]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_DOM_Reference

One way is with window.open (and ordinary page request) to create a popup. But they look nasty since browsers these days won't allow you to remove status bars, address field etc.

The other way is by showing a div or similar in the current document. Either by creating it dynamically, or by having it there all the time and just changing display or visibility CSS properties.

To check the phone number, you perform an XHR (xml http request), aka ajax.
The response returned is preferably json_encoded, so that you can eval the returned result, and then go through it to decide what information should be presented to the user.

Doing it all from the ground up by yourself takes a bit of initial work, mainly due to browser inconsistencies, but it might be a good learning experience. If you don't care about that or are looking for quicker results, there are numerous javascript libraries that can help you out. jQuery, prototype, yui among many others.
Another reason to look into libraries is if you want more complex visual effects.

[latguy]

I guess I am more concerned with how this is going to work.

🙂

If I have the pop-up window come up, how will that pop-up take the users input and throw it back to the main window?

I am a PHP programmer that has LITTLE to no experience with javascript otherthan client side validation and a few javascript/css tricks 🙁

I am building an Intranet Service Ticket system for my workplace, and I am wanting to avoid having alot of waiting on pages to load. I was thinking that the pop-up would avoid loading another page. I know about AJAX and how to use it, but never coupled it with pop-up windows. Would the POP-UP be another session? I was thinking about using the session global, but then got to thinking about a pop-up being another window and another session.

Could you explain how that would work for me?

[JPnyc]

why not use a dynamic HTML pop-up? That way you don't have to worry about it. I'm sure you've seen them on sites, it's just a div hidden/displayed with JavaScript and absolute positioned in the middle of the page, or wherever you choose.