POST Data Without Form - php

Basically I have a bunch of data I get from a database and put onto my page in a table. Right now I have the user type in the name, session, etc. in the table and that is sent as post data into the next PHP page, which I then use to lookup more stuff in the DB and so on and so forth.
Obviously that's not a great user experience; it would be much easier to simply CLICK the item in the table and everything gets sent automatically into the next page.
I'm not sure how I'd go about doing this.
My tables are first and last names for now, so if you click a certain row it should go to the next page sending each cell as data.
EDIT: Some examples:
Traditionally you do this with a form
<form method="post" action="pageDataIsGoingTo.php">
to send data to the next page. However, I don't want to do this with a form; but rather when they click a URL and/or button that sends the data. I can "hide" the data from view I suppose, but I still don't know the function to actually go ahead and do that.
Would I make a javascript button/function that sets something in an invisible form?

You can use invisible/hidden form fields.
That might be your best guess.
Javascript would be a good solution if you wanted an ajax POST call, but you want to load other page.
So hidden form fields are your solution.
Parallel with table data.
You need to embed hidden fields and your visible item row within a form
(so each item row contains also a form & hidden form fields and visible submit button,
which you can style with css)
This presuming that your table contains more items which you can choose to send.
Although I would do this with backbone & jquery and do it all in ajax.

Related

Two submit buttons - perform cgi on second

I am working on a form that allows the user to edit, add, and remove committees. In the edit section, I wrote php code that allows the user to select (from a drop down populated by a csv) the name of the committee and then, when a first submit is clicked, information about that committee automatically displays in the fields of the form.
The problem is that I need cgi action linked to a second submit button at the end of the form, so that once it is clicked, all of the information will be updated. This is the button that actually needs to send in the data. The previous submit button was so the php could get the value of the selected committee and the info about it. The php-autofill feature is to (hopefully) make life easier for the user. The php is very intertwined with the html so having a separate file would be tricky.
My question: can I have two submit buttons in one form if the form has action="something.cgi" and only the second button is supposed to do the action?
You need to use either (A) Use two separate forms with separate action's, or (B) Write a JS handler for the second button to post to a different URL

dynamically filled forms with Jquery & Ajax

I have a bit of a problem achieving what I'm trying to do.
I'm doing a mailbox like page and I'd like to add a "Respond" button which will fill a form with some values.
I'm generating my page message by message in php. For each message I generate an input button with its own id and when I click on the button, I'd like to open a form in a new window, with the recipient and title prefilled and not changeable by the user, with another textarea that the user can fill with his message.
For that, I have a general template for a form containing 3 values (recipient, title and message). All are (for the moment) text or textarea values.
Is it possible to use one form to send a message to anyone, or do I have to generate a form for each message with pre filled values ? The last solution seems quite horrible to do.
I tried to find something that I could do with only javascript, since I want the form to be submitted asynchronously by Ajax.
I can make an onClick event and pass the values to that function, but in that case I won't have the values of the textarea the user will have entered.
Is there a way to do, for example, an entire form in Javascript with the values I'll pass through the onClick event, get the value of the textarea from the form that would have been populated with these values, and then send everything through Ajax ?
Well, here is what I did.
For each Respond button generated, I set an onClick event passing the fields I wanted to be pre-filled in my form to a JS function RespondMessage()
I also made a form at the bottom of my page that I hid with css.
This form contains as much hidden fields as I want pre-filled datas, and as much spans as I want to show infos.
When I call the RespondMessage function, I manually set the hidden fields in my form with the arguments I called the function with.
After that I fill my spans with the infos I want to show (for example, I set the recipient's name for my message like that).
Once all of that is done, your form is ready to be displayed. So after setting the fields in the form, I just pass the form from display:none to display:block, and do a lot of css tricks to make that smooth and beautiful.
So now you have your pre-filled form, you just need another function that will make an Ajax call to avoid reloading the page after each response, and you'll call it with the onClick event of your form's submission button.
I hope that this process will help someone.
I'm not quite sure that it's the best way to do it and I find it quite dirty and exploitable so you need a bit more server side checking than usual, but it does the job.
I don't provide code because it's mostly all really specific to the application you're setting up.

Preserving data in one form when submitting a second form

I have a page with two forms that is generated with PHP.
The first part contains text boxes, a submit button and a clear button.
The second form is just a button called "Add more text boxes" so the user can add more to his form if he needs to.
The problem is when I click the "Add more rows" which loads another page which changes a value.
This value then affects the original page when it reloads causing more text boxes to get created.
The problem is that I lose all the data that was entered.
Is there any way to preserve the data when the user clicks "Add more rows"?.
Here's a screenshot of my page.
Thanks
If you want to do it without js than you put all in one form. When you click button to add row all entered data will be available in $_POST or $_GET so you can fill form with existing data and add a row when generating new page.
Ideally you should use javascript to dynamically add new rows w/out making new requests to the server and loading new pages. But if you want to keep it javascript free. If it's all the same php script just controlled by conditions, just use the $_POST['variable'] values as the value="$_POST['variable']" in your fields. If it's handled through multiple scripts, you can use a session variable to pass the data from one page to the next.

Post Array Data from Multiple Selects to Mysql

I have a form-1 which has 4 fields. when the user inputs data in these and hits submit, he is taken to form 2 for further selection of more items from multiple selection box. after selections are complete, he is prompted to update and on updating, all the data has to go to a third form for processing.
currently i am passing the single fields data from second form to third form by <input type="hidden" name="abc" value="<?php echo $x[0] ?>">
I am getting stuck as to how to retreive all multiple selected items from the array, perform a calculation on them and then post to mysql and then update the user with posted information.
or is there a better way of doing this, pl. guide me. my fields are:-
first page
customer id - single selection field
date - input
segment selection - single selection field
second page
items inputs - itemid, quantity,price (these are in one row and user will dynamically add or delete rows based on requirements. i have done this through Javascript)
now after all this, i want to gather all details of customer, segment, items(id,quantities,prices) and then post them to mysql.
If you want to use separate pages you can use either hidden inputs fields or sessions to pass along their selections. With sessions, you'd just store the array of data in $_SESSION and use session_start() on each page to get the session from the previous page. With hidden inputs, you can store them just like you would with session, and when they click POST you will rewrite them into the form. Are you stuck on specific aspect of doing this?
On the final page use either the session or the hidden fields (depending on your chosen method) + the final POST, to query MySQL.
Note: As Zirak mentioned in the comments, you could also do this using a single page. You'd use one of the same methods described above, except it would post to itself rather than to another page. This might be a faster/better way to code the page... If you opt for the single page method just ensure that you make it possible to go back, both through their browsers back button and a link you provide.

Multi page ordering form php or ajax

I'm looking to create a multi page ordering form the first page would contain some dropdown and text fields, the second page would contain more text fields, the third page would be an order summery with paypal payment option.
I'm just wondering what the best way to create this order form is. I've used sessions in the past but never with users entering in text and picking items from drop downs, does anyone have any resources for doing this? Or does anyone know of a jquery or other ajax example or plugin I might be able to use and modify.
any insight would be a big help.
thanks
The simplest technique might be to use hidden form fields to carry fields from previous screens through to the final screen.
Just make sure you validate all the values when the final screen is submitted to make sure that the user hasn't twiddled the data.
You don't need to do pagination at all if you don't won't to. Just use css to show/hide the "pages". It doesn't sound like you have to save the "state" at any point.
But if you want to do multiple pages, use a session or a cookie to track the user. Then save the data to a database a mark it as incomplete. On the final page, retrieve it all and show it on the page. The server can't tell if a request is ajax or not, so it doesn't matter what you use for submission.

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