Why would some $_POST variables go missing for a form with PHP?
- by Chad Johnson
Sometimes, multiple times a day in fact, users of my web application are submitting a certain form which has about a dozen form fields, half of which are hidden fields, and half of the $_POST data is simply not present in the processing script. Note that the fields that are not present are at the very bottom of the form. I know this because this raises a fatal error, and an email is dispatched to me which includes the post data.
And of course, neither I nor any of the developers on my team can reproduce the problem.
Flash is involved in the process, as I'm using a library called Uploadify to display a progress meter. Here is the flow...does anyone have ANY ideas at all why some of the post data would be getting wiped out?
User visits edit screen for a page in the CMS I am using.
Record id for the page is put into a form as a hidden value.
User clicks the Uploadify browse button and selects a file (only single file selection is allowed).
User clicks Submit button for my form.
jQuery intercepts the form submit action, triggers Uploadify to start uploading, and returns false for the submit action (manually cancelling the form submit event so that Uploadify can take over).
Uploadify uploads to a custom process script.
Uploadify finishes uploading and triggers the Javascript completion callback.
The Javascript callback calls $('#myForm').submit() to submit the form.
This happens on multiple browsers (Firefox 3.5, 3.6, Safari, Internet Explorer 7, 8) and multiple platforms (Mac OS 10.5, 10.6 and Windows XP, 7).
