PHP How to GET the Form variables on multiple items? - php

Question

I need to collect the form elements of a cart. The items are in multiples. I wish to collect them as a session or easy to use Array - I think the Array would be best?
How can I collect this information in process.php?
I hope I have made it clear.
The code is like this for each item:
<div class="product" id="pId_'.$id.'">
<input type="hidden" name="productID" value="'.$id.'" />
<input type="hidden" name="productURL" value="'.$url.'" />
<input type="hidden" name="productQty" value="'.$qty.'" />
<input type="hidden" name="productPrice" value="'.$price.'" />
</div>
So the use cart could have :
<div class="product" id="pId_2">
<input type="hidden" name="productID" value="2" />
<input type="hidden" name="productURL" value="site.com" />
<input type="hidden" name="productQty" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="productPrice" value="750" />
</div>
<div class="product" id="pId_45">
<input type="hidden" name="productID" value="45" />
<input type="hidden" name="productURL" value="example.co.uk" />
<input type="hidden" name="productQty" value="2" />
<input type="hidden" name="productPrice" value="100" />
</div>
These details are submitted to the form.. but how can I collect when productID is called twice or more?

Answer 1

If you just need to collect the items for processing later, another way of doing it is to loop through all the POST variables. PHP will collect all information submitted into a reserved variable, $_POST.
From there you could use a foreach to loop through the information collected as follows;
foreach ($_POST as $key => $value)
{
echo "$key = $value";
}
Where $key would be your someitem_ and $value would contain the actual value submitted.
This would work easier provided you did not have any other inputs in your form other then those of the shopping cart items, if not you'll have to do some logic to determine which were the records that were associated with your cart items.
On a side note, if it is possible to combine the 3 related input values into just 1, with the values separated by a character you defined (maybe something like <item>|<name>|<url>), it might make your life easier when trying to get all the 3 values that are associated with the id.
In that case your code would just get the string value for the specific id and do a split() on the '|' to break it up back into its 3 values.

Answer 2

If you add square-brackets to your input names
<input type="hidden" name="productID[]" value="' . $id . '" />
<input type="hidden" name="productURL[]" value="' . $url . '" />
<input type="hidden" name="productQty[]" value="' . $qty . '" />
<input type="hidden" name="productPrice[]" value="' . $price . '" />
you can then collect and use all form data by adding the following PHP code to your process.php file
foreach ($_POST['productID'] as $key => $getid) {
$getqty = $_POST['productQty'][$key];
$getprice = $_POST['productPrice'][$key];
$geturl = $_POST['productURL'][$key];
// Example MySQL Query
mysql_query("INSERT INTO orders (id, url, quantity, price) VALUES ('" . $getid . "', '" . $geturl . "', '" . $getqty . "', '" . $getprice . "')");
}
What this does is that it automatically creates arrays for the form data so that you can, using the PHP code above, collect the correct data from each row by using the index number via the $key variable.

Answer 3

I believe in your process.php form you could just store them in an array when you pull in the post data. You will need to pass the largest value of $id as a value as well so you can loop through the appropriate amount of items.
The top of your process.php might look like
<?php
$processArray = array();
$id = $_POST["id"];
$i = 0;
while ($i <= $id) {
$processArray = ('item' => $_POST["someitem"_.$i], 'name' => $_POST["somename"_.$i], 'url' => $_POST["someurl"_.$i]):
//Now you can do what you want with each value. Display it somewhere, store it somewhere, etc.
$i++;
}
I did this off the top of my head but that's what comes to mind when I look at your issues.

Answer 4

I'm not entirely sure of what you're asking. But you can retrieve arrays from $_POST if the field names are appended with [].
<input name="myArray[1]" value="foo" />
<input name="myArray[37]" value="bar" />
Would give you
array(
1 => 'foo',
37 => 'bar'
)

Answer 5

<form action="process.php" method="post">
These elements are looped pending on cart items
<input type="hidden" name="someitem['.$id.']" value="1" size="1" maxlength="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="somename['.$id.']" value="1" size="1" maxlength="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="someurl['.$id.']" value="1" size="1" maxlength="1" />
</form>

Answer 6

Use:
<input type="hidden" name="someitem[]" value="1" size="1" maxlength="1" />
And then in PHP $_GET["someitem"] will be an array
EDIT: Use $_POST["someitem"]. I had assumed you needed GET, because of the title of the question.