Output from Forms Help

[alantony]

Hello,

thanks in advance for your ideas. I am working to help a non-profit medical organization with required documentation.

 

I have a few forms which must populate a number of transcription templates for a medical office.

 

For example,

 

input form:

 

Last Name:<input type="text" name="last_name" size="15"><br>
First Name:<input type="text" name="first_name" size="15"><br>

 

output templates:

 

<div id="demographic">
<p class="content">
<b>Patient Name:</b> <b> $_POST[lastname],  $_POST[firstname] </b> <br>
<b>Date:</b>&nbsp $_POST[date]  <br>
<b> Record#:</b> <br>
<b>Pre-Operative Diagnosis:</b> &nbsp $_POST[preop] &nbsp <b>Post-Op Diagnosis:</b> &nbsp $_POST[postop]<br>
<b>Procedure:</b> $_POST[side]&nbsp $_POST[proclevel_1]&nbsp$_POST[proclevel_2]&nbsp$_POST[proclevel_3]&nbsp Lumbar Transforminal Epidural Steroid Injection with Epidurogram<br>
<b>Anesthesia:</b> &nbsp Local with 1% Lidocaine<br>
<p>
</div>

 

here is another form:

 

<div id="demographic">
<p class="content">
Patient Name, $_POST[lastname],  $_POST[firstname] presents with a headache and neck pain on $_POST[date] 
<p>
</div>

 

I am trying to keep the code base clean and simple.  would it make sense to store the templates in a database or have the input forms just populate the templates as individual files.  This will lead to 40 or 50 template files and unique input forms <action="template file #1" METHOD="POST">.  Your design thoughts would be greatly appreciated and how (in general)?

 

thanks

 

[phpzone]

I wouldn't put the templates in a database, better to store them on the filesystem.  We used to put ours in a database but it becomes a pain updating and editing them in the DB, especially not easy to do a find and replace when compared to having them on the filesystem.

 

Looking at your templates, I wouldn't use $_POST directly in the templates, I would first store them in a separate variables or array, you need to make sure that the values are properly encoded for including in HTML.

 

I wasn't aware at one point, but do you know you can receive an array back directly from a form, you need to name your form fields as such:

 

     <input type="text" name="inputs[firstname]" value="{$inputs['firstname']}" />
     <input type="text" name="inputs[surname]" value="{$inputs['surname']}" />

 

When the form posts back, you can get the entire set of inputs with:

 

     $inputs = $_POST['inputs'];

 

Before outputting your template you could encode them all for HTML:

 

     foreach( $inputs as $key=>$value )
     {
            $inputs[$key] = htmlspecialchars( $value, ENT_QUOTES );
     }

 

Just a view suggestions... You may also want to look at Smarty Templates, not everyone agrees with a templating system like Smarty, but if you want to offer the facility of editing their own templates to a client it can be great, because you can restrict being able to put any PHP code in.

 

Hope these few comments help.