dropdown menus and postback with PHP?

[thisperishedmin]

hello everyone, im pretty new to PHP and still trying to grasp the power in this language (and web development as a whole).  as part of an assignment i was given, I need to create an image gallery with navigation based on dropdown menus.  The idea was explained to me based on the postback feature of asp.net - where you could make a selection in the first menu (dynamically generate based off of the file system), and it would dynamically generate the submenu and display any images.

 

Now i realize PHP is a completely different animal and that this task is utterly horrid for a learner, but theres not much I can do but try to devise some kind of method to do the same thing.

 

I was wondering if anyone has any kind of helpful input or code examples to do this?

 

My largest problems are that while I can create a while loop to continue to generate the menus, i lack anyway to hold the "selection" that was made and accurately maintain the current directory path....

 

Additionally, I am having trouble with the is_dir and is_file functions to identify the contents of a selected directory to ultimately detect whether or not it should create another dropdown and/or display the thumbnails of images.

 

Hopefully some of this makes sense, im open to any suggestions and questions to try and work through this. id love to create a set of functions for others to use to create the dynamically generated series of dropdown navigation menus and make it available to everyone.  In either case, thanks in advance!

 

EDIT: I am working off the local host if it has any effect....

 

heres the extremely rough code with lots of random output to try and track whats going on. its a mess  ...thanks again...

 

<?php
function listgen($directory)
{
echo "<form method = 'POST'>
  <div align='left'>
  <select name = 'dropdown'>";
  
  
$dropdown = array();

if ($handle = opendir($directory));

while ( false !== ($folders = readdir($handle)) )
{
  
    if ($folders == "." || $folders == "..")
     {
      continue;
     }

  array_push ($dropdown, $folders);

  

} 

foreach($dropdown as $item)
  {
    echo "<option value='" . $item . "'>" . $item . "</option>";
  }

echo "</select>

      <input type = 'submit' value = 'Go'>";

}



$filepath = 'images/';

listgen ("$filepath");


if ( isset($_POST['dropdown']))
{

$filepath = $filepath .= $_POST['dropdown'] .= '/';

echo $filepath . "<p>";


//function to check for folders
if (is_dir($filepath))
{
    if ($handle = opendir($filepath))
{
        while (($path = readdir($handle)) !== false)
	{
		//test if a folder
		if (is_dir($path))
		{
		echo "</br> Folder exists";
		$folder_exists = '1';
		break;
		}
	}
    }
}


//function to check for images
if (is_dir($filepath))
{
    if ($handle = opendir($filepath))
{
        while (($path = readdir($handle)) !== false)
	{

		//test if a file
		if (is_file($path))
		{
		echo "</br> file exists";
		$file_exists = '1';
		break;
		}
	}
    }
}

}

?>

[neel_basu]

Nobody needs to know the story to solve a problem. Ask questions / Solutions if you have problem and explain your problem not your story else nobody can help you.