Get the dynamically generated name from the form into the $_POST - php

Question

I'm currently working on a personal content management system project, but I've run into a problem.
<ul>
<?php
if(!$result) { //Check for result
die("You have no pages &#9785 Why not create one?");
} else {
while ($pages = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) { //Loop through results
?>
<li class="triple"><span><?php echo $pages["title"]?></span><span><?php echo $pages["visible"] ?><span /><form action = "editPage.php" method="post"><input type="submit" value="Edit Page" name="<?php $pages["title"];?>" /></form></li> //Create li elements for each result that gets created
<?php
};
};
?>
</ul>
Basically I'm using a query to results from a MySQL table and make a list of pages, the problem I've run into is that on the end form what I want to happen is I want a session variable to be stored saying which page is going to be edited, but I can't use $_POST in the form at the end to get the name because obviously the name is automatically generated from the table. Each person who uses it would have a different name for a page so I can't just get one name e.g. $_POST['homepage'].
If anyone can offer any advice on how to solve my problem or even how to come up with a better solution to store which page will be edited as it goes onto another page (editPage.php) that would be great.

Answer 1

Use $_SESSION[] to store the data for your $page arrays and access it again on editPage.php. You will need to make sure you call start_session(); on both pages though for it to work as expected. Since you're creating multiple forms and don't know which one will be submitted at the time PHP is running you would need to store all the pages in your $_SESSION and then iterate through them to check for the one which was selected in editPage.php:
$_SESSION['pages'] = array();
while ($page = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
$_SESSION['pages'][] = $page;
echo "<li class=\"triple\">
<span>".$page["title"]."</span>
<span>".$page["visible"]."</span>
<form action=\"editPage.php\" method=\"post\">
<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"pageID\" value=\"".$page['id']."\">
<input type=\"submit\" value=\"Edit Page\">
</form>
</li>";
}
Then in editPage.php
foreach($_SESSION['pages'] as $page){
if($page['id'] == $_POST['pageID']){ $editpage = $page; break; }
}
// do stuff with $editpage data
Another option would be to use serialize($page) and send the array with the form data in a hidden input element.
<input type='hidden' name='data' value='<?php echo serialize($page); ?>'>
Then you can use $editpage = unserialize($_POST['data']); to turn it back into an array in editPage.php.