How to process HTML form that has dynamic elements? - php

Question

Apologies if this is somewhat of a duplicate question, I did see others but I didn't quite find what I was looking for.
You can see my code in the following jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/ZnWMq/
As you can see, I have named my drop-downs tags[], values[] and operands[] - i.e. as arrays so that whatever PHP page we set as the action of the form will be able to process the dynamically added drop-downs.
I'm just a bit confused on how to split out the values once they are sent to the page dealing with the form submission so if anyone can shed some light I would be very grateful.
Regards,
Martin
UPDATE
Hi, thanks for your replies.
so far I have changed the action of the form to advancedsearch.php using the POST method and here is the code:
<?php
$tags = $_POST['tags'];
$operands = $_POST['operands'];
$values = $_POST['values'];
foreach ($tags as $t)
{
echo "$t<br />";
}
foreach ($operands as $o)
{
echo "$o<br />";
}
foreach ($values as $v)
{
echo "$v<br />";
}
?>
This gets the values ok but it just needs tweaked so I can get it into a format for querying a MySQL database, so something like SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE tag1 operand1 value1 radio_button_value(AND or OR) tag2 operand2 value2 radio_button_value etc
Hope that makes sense.

Answer 1

So when you click 'Advanced Search'
you want to get the values of the
s ? – Alex Thomas 6 mins ago
If this is the case, then this should help: http://jsfiddle.net/ZnWMq/1/
I've done the code to work on the clicking of a span as i didn't want to disrupt your code. Heres my code:
$('#click').click(function(){
tags = $("select[name='tags[]'] option:selected").val();
operands = $("select[name='operands[]'] option:selected").val();
values = $("select[name='values[]'] option:selected").val();
output = tags+" "+operands+" "+values;
alert(output);
});
If this is not what you're after, i'll try again :)

Answer 2

In this case you will receive 3 post variables as arrays and they should have equal length (in term of count). You will need code like that:
$filterCount = count($_POST['tags']);
$filters = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < $filterCount; $i++) {
$filters[] = array('tag' => $_POST['tags'][$i], 'operand' => $_POST['operands'][$i], 'value' => $_POST['values'][$i]);
}
Also you can try different approach. For example you can use different name for each filter like that:
<select name="filter1[tag]" class="tags">
<option>tags</option>
</select>
<select name="filter1[operand]" class="operands">
<option>operands</option>
</select>
<select name="filter1[value]" class="values">
<option>values</option>
</select>
When you clone the filter you have to change the name to filterN.

Answer 3

managed it by doing the following:
<?php
$tags = $_POST['tags'];
$operands = $_POST['operands'];
$values = $_POST['values'];
$cat = $_POST['cat'];
print "<pre>";
print_r ($_POST);
$query .="WHERE ";
for ($counter=0 ; $counter < count($tags) ; $counter++)
{
if ($counter>0)
{
$query .= "$cat ";
}
$query .= sprintf("%s %s '%s' ", $tags[$counter] , $operands[$counter] ,
$values[$counter]) ;
}
echo "$query";
?>