RE: [PHP] Forms Question

Hey there, Maintaining state in a web application is always a difficult thing.. fortunatly, you use PHP, which makes it a bit easier. However, if you do not want anything written to the server or to the user's drive you are out of luck, simply because at very least you will need to have the user download your HTML which will be written to the hard drive for caching. There are a few ways of doing making this work: 1) Store the form values from the previous form stored in hidden form fields on each page of the form, such as the fields the user filled out on form1 will be stored as hidden form fields on form2, the fields from form1 and form2 will be stored in hidden fields on form3, etc.. This is not the cleanest way, but as far as crossplatforming goes, it's one of the best. 2) Use a cookie to store the form fields. YUCK! Cookies have many good applications, but they are usually disabled on the user's browser as they have been miss used in the past. of course, this goes against your rule of keeping things from being written on the user's harddrive. 3) Finally, you could use sessions. The cleanest way i would think to pass variables from one form to another is to create an object in PHP that contains the fields in the form as variables. Pass that object from form to form, adding the information the application recieves from the user into the object at each form submit. That way, all you have to do is to pass the sessionid from page to page. How do you do that you ask? 2 ways: 1) you could save it in a cookie (this is the default way of passing sessionids in PHP), 2) OR you can use a really cool thing PHP does and turn URL-rewriting on in the php.ini file. This will automatically rewrite all the urls you have on your page to append the ?SESSIONID=<id> at the end and include the sessionid as a hidden form field on all your pages. Cool, huh? yeah.. PHP kicks ass. =) If you need more help on how to do this, don't hesitate to ask. good luck! -Chris -----Original Message----- From: Beauford.2002 [mailto:beauford.2002@rogers.com] Sent: Sat 2/15/2003 10:02 AM To: PHP General Cc: Subject: [PHP] Forms Question Hi, Im trying to figure out the best way to do the following. I need to have a series of forms that when the user finishes the first part of the form he is sent to another page where a second form is filled out, and then a third. Making the forms etc. is no problem, what I'm not sure of is how to keep the data from all forms so it can be displayed at the end. I don't want to have anything written to the users drive, or to the server - so this information would have to be kept in memory. Would an array work in this situation? Any ideas are appreciated. TIA -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php