PHP - Best practice to retain form values across postback
- by Adam
Hello,
Complete PHP novice here, almost all my previous work was in ASP.NET. I am now working on a PHP project, and the first rock I have stumbled upon is retaining values across postback.
For the most simple yet still realistic example, i have 10 dropdowns. They are not even databound yet, as that is my next step. They are simple dropdowns.
I have my entire page inclosed in a tag. the onclick() event for each dropdown, calls a javascript function that will populate the corrosponding dropdowns hidden element, with the dropdowns selected value. Then, upon page reload, if that hidden value is not empty, i set the selected option = that of my hidden.
This works great for a single postback. However, when another dropdown is changed, the original 1'st dropdown loses its value, due to its corrosponding hidden value losing its value as well!
This draws me to look into using querystring, or sessions, or... some other idea.
Could someone point me in the right direction, as to which option is the best in my situation? I am a PHP novice, however I am being required to do some pretty intense stuff for my skill level, so I need something flexable and preferribly somewhat easy to use.
Thanks!
-----edit-----
A little more clarification on my question :)
When i say 'PostBack' I am referring to the page/form being submitted. The control is passed back to the server, and the HTML/PHP code is executed again.
As for the dropdowns & hiddens, the reason I used hidden variables to retain the "selected value" or "selected index", is so that when the page is submitted, I am able to redraw the dropdown with the previous selection, instead of defaulting back to the first index. When I use the $_POST[] command, I am unable to retrieve the dropdown by name, but I am able to retrieve the hidden value by name. This is why upon dropdown-changed event, I call javascript which sets the selected value from the dropdown into its corrosponding hidden.
