[RESOLVED] Extending Form Questions

rigorlicious

Hi guys,

I'm building a form and I have 2 (hopefully quick) questions.

Does anyone know how or where I would find information about having a form have the option to create more form fields?

for example if my form is to make a square and it has fields that ask for the length and width, I want the option for the user to click a button and it gives them the fields to make a second square.

Assuming that functionality is available, how would the information be stored into a database as you wouldn't be able to know how many squares a user chooses to make?

If anyone knows or has done anything like this, any help would be really appreciated!

Regards

NogDog

This would typically be done with JavaScript code on the browser side. (It could be done with PHP on the server side, but that would be pretty inefficient.)
Use a separate DB table for the "squares". Besides fields for the square data (height, width, plus whatever else), it would also contain a field for the ID of the row in the "main" table so that those square rows are related to that main entry. (Thus the reason they are called "relational" databases. 🙂 ) Here's a pretty good MySQL tutorial on the whole relational tables and database "normalization" that might help, if this kind of thing is new to your: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/intro-to-normalization.html. When retrieving data from the DB, you would then typically need to use a "join" to grab the desired table out of both tables.

rigorlicious

That's twice now you've helped me out. I really can't thank you enough!