Maintaining State

[Anon]

This is a simply question I've not found an answer to.

When creating form elements on a page the refers to itself, how do I keep the form elements set to the user setting with each post to the page.

for example

<form method="POST" action "page.php">

Radio Buton = Yes or No
Text Fields with values added by user
Pop Up Menus with user selection

SUBMIT Button
</form>

When the user first comes to the page and select "Yes", a pop up menu item, and types some text into the text field and then hits submit, the page "resets" back to zero so to speak instead of refreshing with the user input.

In Perl, all this is handled transparently by the CGI.pm, but I've not seen any functions (built in or otherwise) that handle these situations in a similar manner.

How to I go about this in PHP???

[Anon]

for the text fields you just echo the value of the variable:

<FORM>
<INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="mytextfield" VALUE="<? echo $mytextfield ?>">
</FORM>

You do a similar thing for radio buttons and selects but you have to use if/thens:

<FORM>
<SELECT NAME="myselect">
<OPTION<? if ($myselect=="val1") print " SELECTED" ?>>val1</OPTION>
<OPTION<? if ($myselect=="val2") print " SELECTED" ?>>val2</OPTION>
</SELECT>

YOu can also do this when you pull values from a DB, but that is another story for another day. :-)

[Anon]

that's too hard. just go to sourceforge and search for 'extremephp'. There is form classes there that maintain state automatically for any form object unless you don't want them to. It's also super easy to use and there are frameworks that you can use to seperate the logic of creating the form and processing the form using an observer pattern. Lots of the plumbing is already done as it takes care of validating and all the control logic. It's neat stuff.