My form is erased when pressing "back"

[Anon]

I tried searching for this problem but no luck. I have this form which is being validated serverside, however, if the user fails to enter correct data he must press back. Then the form is erased and he has to enter it all over again. Which is not nice...

I actually thought of saving a cookie with userinput, but, really, there has to be an easier way? Please? =)

Hope to hear from ya!

Regs
Summer

[bastien]

are you validating clientside or serverside?

If serverside, the input elements names form the $elementname variable in PHP.

What I do for this is to create a function that shows the form and each element has a value called $elementname:

<input type =text name = firstname value = "$firstname">

when the function is called and the form is opened for the first time, all the $elementnames are blank, resulting in empty fields...if the form was submitted and one of the elements caused a failure, then the form will show with the vairables filled in...

This is a great way of not pissing off your users by making them reenter the info...

Bastien

[Anon]

I agree. Many browsers will try to keep the form the same when pressing back, but some won't at all. Also if javascript is used, or if the page does not cache, then the form may be blank.

[Anon]

hiya!

I tried doing something like this:

<input name='user_name' type='text' id='user_name' class="textboxs" value="<? echo $user_name ?>">

but it's still the same in IE, NS, Opera, and Mozilla.

I'm going nuts...

regs
Summer

[daynah]

Here's some pseudocode...

1) Make the form
2) Let user press a 'preview' button
3) The data in the form before is transferred to the 'preview' form. (You can see how this is done from Bastien's post. 🙂 )
4) In this preview mode, if any data is incorrect (you check using functions like is_numeric(), is_digit(), isset(), etc. then prompt a message telling the user what is wrong. "Your age must be a numeric number..."
5) If some data is incorrect, only show a 'preview', if all the data is valid, then let the user submit it.

I hope that helps a bit. 🙂

[rrijnders]

I think you are unclear-on-the-concept. Stop using the "back" button, it won't work.

Put your form into a seperate file or function with the fields like so:

<INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="uName" VALUE="<?=$uName; ?>">

Then in your script:

<?PHP
if (!$submit) {
&nbsp;display_form();
}
else {
&nbsp;$err = validate_form();
&nbsp;if (!$err) {
&nbsp;&nbsp;process_form();
&nbsp;&nbsp;header("Location: thankYou.php");
&nbsp;}
&nbsp;else{
&nbsp;&nbsp;display_form();
&nbsp;&nbsp;print_errors();
&nbsp;}
}
?>

-- Rich

[Anon]

If I validate server side (which is a bad idea, as it ties up the server with something that should be done client side) then I have a little "Go Back" button on the validation form.

The user will only see this form if he entered bad data. This button is nothing more than a jscript that uses history, like:

<A href=\"javascript: history.go(-1);\" . . .

True, your users could still hit their browser's back button, so this is only a partial solution.