Form Tutorials

[kevgray]

Hi folks,

This is my first visit to this forum.

I'm looking for any tutorials to do with FORMS. I have coded my own but I'm not totally happy with it and would like to 'clean it up'.

 

What I want to achieve is -

 

Display a FORM

 

Receive the input

 

Validate the input

 

If valid, display the information and ask for confirmation

If not valid re-display the form for correction

 

If confirmed, write the output to a .csv file and display a 'thank you'  ???message

If not confirmed go back to the original form so it can be changed.

 

I am currently doing this in 3 php scripts but I'm sure there must be a better way.

 

Thanks in advance for any info you can provide.

Kev Gray

[kevgray]

 

 

....surely someone can point me somewhere.................please !!!!!

[wildteen88]

You can do it all in one script. When you submit the form you will want it to submit to itself by having $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] as the action eg:

<form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="post">

 

Make sure your submit button has a name, for example submit. Then some place in your script you have an if statement that will check whether $_POST['submit'] variable exist like so:

if(isset($_POST['submit']))
{
    // do all validation here
    // if it passes validation save post'd data to .csv
}

 

Here is a working example of what I mean:

<?php

// check that form has been submitted
// if _POST['submit'] var exists it has been submitted
if(isset($_POST['submit']))
{
    // lets validate posted data

    $err = null;

    // check that the name field has been filled in
    // and that it only contains letters and spaces
    if(!isset($_POST['name']) || !eregi('[a-zA-Z ]+', $_POST['name']))
    {
        $err[] = 'Make sure you have filled in your name and that it only contains letters';
    }

    // check that the age field has been filled in
    // and that it contains only numbers
    if(!isset($_POST['age']) || !is_numeric($_POST['age']))
    {
        $err[] = 'Make sure you have filled in your age and that it only contains numbers';
    }

    // check whether any errors have been flaged from validation proccess above:
    if(is_array($err))
    {
        // errors have been flagged
        // lets display them
        // The form will be shown too.
        echo 'Please correct the following errros:';
        echo "\n<br />\n<ul>\n  <li>" . implode("</li>\n  <li>", $err) . "</li>\n</ul>\n<br />\n";
    }
    else
    {
        // no errors have been flagged
        // data is valid, lets add it to a .csv file

        // open the .csv file
        $csv_handler = fopen('data.csv', 'a');

        // remove the submit var. We don't want to store this.
        unset($_POST['submit']);

        // prepare data to be added to csv file
        // format to be added to file:
        //       "[name]", "[age]"
        $csv_entry = '"' . implode('", "', $_POST) . "\"\r\n";

        // write the prepared string to the csv file
        fwrite($csv_handler, $csv_entry, strlen($csv_entry));

        // close the file
        fclose($csv_handler);

        // print a successfully added message
        echo "Successfully added name and age to csv";

        exit;
    }
}

?>
<form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="post">
  Name: <input type="text" name="name" value="<?php echo isset($_POST['name']) ? $_POST['name'] : '' ?>" /><br />
  Age:  <input type="text" name="age" value="<?php echo isset($_POST['age']) ? $_POST['age'] : '' ?>"><br />
  <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Add" />
</form>

 

Note it is basic and is just a simple example of how to process form information on the same page.

[kevgray]

Thanks Wildteen for your answer,.

 

The other thing I want to do in the script is, after all data is valid but not necessarily correct (the user may have made a 'valid' mistake) is to display the input and ask for confirmation that the data is correct before commiting the data to the csv file.

 

Currently I am doing this in another script and passing input data to it via a form with 'hidden' fields. Is this possible to acomplish in the single script.

 

My current site using what I have now is at 

 

www.isra2008.com/register_over.php

 

I hope this makes sense. Thanks very much for you time.

 

Cheers

Kev