Saving & calling User Information in Pagination

[worleyjbird]

Hi All,

I have a page that allows users to search for a product. When there are more than, say, 25 products I get the pagination at the bottom of the page.  Here's the kicker, on the main search page, users can input text into a text area. The issue is that (a) Once I click next to go to page 2, the data gets wiped out. And (b) If I click back to page 1, the text is wiped out as well.

 

I want the user to type something and when they navigate to different pages, the text will always be there, regardless of how many pages the search results display. I created a session but its not working. When I echo the session to check for the text it says: "["sample_text"]=>  string(0) "" }"

 

I know it might sound strange that people are inputting text on a search page. They are really unrelated but the text is displayed along with the search results and thus I need to maintain that text when going from page to page, etc.

 

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

[willpower]

sessions are you r way forward...i just dont think you have set the session up correctly...code would be useful here

[worleyjbird]

Thanks for the response. The first line is what I added, the rest of the code checks to see if the user inputted any text. I'm not showing the echo statement which is later in the script but I'm assuming that isn't needed here because its printing the session, just not the 'sample_text'.

 

$_SESSION['sample_text'] = htmlspecialchars($_POST['sample_text']);
if(isset($_SESSION['sample_text'])) {
       $render_text_value = htmlspecialchars($_SESSION['sample_text'], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
} elseif (isset($_POST['sample_text'])) {

       $render_text_value = htmlspecialchars($_POST['sample_text'], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
} elseif (isset($_GET['sample_text'])) {
       $render_text_value = htmlspecialchars($_GET['sample_text'], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
} else {
$render_text_value = DEFAULT_RENDER_TEXT;
}

Hope this helps.