Publish submitted form content directly to page - php

Question

I have a very basic form consisting of only two dropdown boxes (though the contents of the second dropdown vary depending on the selection made in the first). I then have a bit of text that displays under the second dropdown box once a selection has been made, and what the text says is unique to whatever selection is made.
What I want to be able to do is have this information directly publish into a table that will be included at the bottom of the same page the form is located on, once a user hits the submit button. In other words, when a user submits the form, I don't want it to simply spit the user's info back to them; I want the info to actually publish to the page in a table, so that anyone who logs in can see it, and can add their own published info to the table as well.
You could think of it sort of like a blog commenting system that automatically publishes new content to the page every time a visitor submits the form, except, instead of text areas that allow users to insert whatever they want, I have dropdown boxes that only allow them to select a certain option, and then have that selected info publish to a table.
How would I go about doing this? I have a beginner's knowledge of PHP, and almost no knowledge of javascript. But depending on how detailed and helpful of an answer that may be provided, I could work with either.
This form is only accessible to members who are logged in, and I have 6 bits of info that I want to have published into a row of 6 columns in the table every time a user hits Submit. Those 6 things are: (1) Username, (2) Time Stamp (Date & Time at which the form was submitted), (3) Selection result of 1st Dropdown, (4) Selection result of 2nd Dropdown, (5) The unique text that is displayed according to whichever selection is made in the 2nd dropdown, and (6) a second time stamp which is calculated as 30 days beyond the time generated in the 2nd column.
Any help would be appreciated. I'm experimenting with PHP a bit but my knowledge is really not advanced enough yet to really allow me to progress much of anywhere on my own.
EDIT:
I did some playing around earlier and have made a few changes. First, I'm now wanting 1 dropdown box, not 2. Second, there are 9 columns in the table, not 6. Third, I have a database with the following 4 tables:
table: members
member_id
firstname
lastname
login
passwd
rank_id
table: ranks
id
name
table: jobs
id
name
requirement_1
requirement_2
requirement_3
salary
rank_id
table: workorders
date
username
rank
job
requirement_1
requirement_2
requirement_3
salary
due_date
Here is the current site I am working on: http://www.kiithsoban.com/membership
You may use a guest login to gain access:
Username: username
Password: password
This is a personal project made for an online gaming clan (in EVE Online), with all of maybe 20 unique visitors a month, so quality and proper coding technique is not much of an issue (not at this point anyway). The primary concern is simply that it will work.
The reason I suggested posting a PHP table rather than taking the javascript route is because I already have a table created in a database (and I'm also more familiar with PHP and just want to get the first version of this online ASAP), and I already have it posting to the website as well, as you'll see on the above page. This is the "workorders" table.
You'll notice upon logging in that there are instructions on the index page referring to a dropdown box, which does not yet exist. The dropdown box will consist of 49 "jobs" to select from. When a user selects an option and submits the form, I want their selection to insert into the "job" field of the workorders table on my database; and, I also want the site to detect the additional information in the other 8 fields in order to automatically insert them as well.
I've been experimenting with one idea, but I'm not sure if it would work, or how to do it exactly. In my members and jobs tables, I've included a "rank_id" field, in which each entry will have a matching value to the "id" field in the ranks table. Now, there are 49 "jobs" to choose from, however, depending on what rank a user is, their job salary will vary (given that there are 7 ranks, 49 * 7 = 343 total possible job/salary combinations that can result from the form submission). What I want the site to do is detect the logged in user's "rank_id" (in the members table), and after the user selects a job from the drop down, find the corresponding job in the jobs table that has the same "rank_id". That, I'm assuming, would allow the site to gather the "User", "Rank", "1st Requirement", "2nd Requirement", "3rd Requirement", and "Salary" info (all of which are contained in the members and jobs tables), and then insert that info into the appropriate fields in the workorders table, so that the info will then post to the site.
At that point all I would need to worry about are the "Date" and "Due By" columns - the "date" being automatically generated as the current date when the form is submitted, and the "due by" being automatically calculated as the current date plus 30 days.
I hope that's a more helpful explanation, and not too confusing.

Answer 1

You will need to create an OnSubmit event for the form which will return false inside the javascript function. The function will then need to add the content to the page. I would give more detailed code if you provided a layout.