GET/POST When?

nicdp

WHen do I have to use GET and when POST in a form?

nashirak

The Get Post is can be used almost at your discretion. It depends on the situation. LIke if you have say a dynamic link or something and you want it to effect something on the next page you would manually put in a get request

<a href="doSomething.php?id=1">Continue</a>

Also you might want to send a GET request if you want your users to be able to Bookmark that page without having to go through some search engine or whatever. (ie. Product Listings, News Articles... etc).
POST is used when you dont want any of this. Or mabye you have a feedback form or something. My want to use POST on that one cause your GET header could get too long. POST is almost always used when you are getting multiple fields on multiple pages (shopping cart checkout). And POST is used when you dont want anyone being able to see some of the varialbles passed (at least by someone looking over you users sholder while hes browsing ie. Passwords and Login Names). Other than this most GET and POST requests can be chosen at your discretion.
Hope that helps.

Anon

The way I think of it is this way. GET is used when retrieving information, and POST is used when submitting information. More generally though, GET should be used in any case where the exact same page can be retrieved multiple times with the same vairables. On the other hand, POST should be used when the page should only called once with that particular set of variables.

For instance, submitting an order form would be a job for POST rather than GET, because the operation should only be completed once, then forgotten. Otherwise the order could be performed multiple times, unintentionally. The resulting page cannot be bookmarked or linked to from other pages (without use of a form). However, a customized product information page would be a good idea for GET, because it's just pulling information from the server, which can be done multiple times by multiple users without a problem. GET then also allows users to bookmark the page, or link to it from other pages.

As stated above though, I've found it best to think of it in terms of the names themselves. Use GET when the user is just getting information from the server, not storing anything to the server. Then use POSt when the user is posting information the server, without intention of receiving anything in particular back.