Thursday, October 22, 2009

Displaying All a Form's Data At Once








Displaying All a Form's Data At Once


We'll start this chapter with a quick onedisplaying all the data a form sends to your web application. When you're creating a web application and things aren't going right, you can use a PHP page like the one we'll develop here to see what's actually being sent to your code. As an example, we'll stock an HTML page with a number of controls, as you see in phpformdata.html, Example 6-1. You can see what this sample page looks like in Figure 6-1.


Example 6-1. Submitting data in a form, phpformdata.html



<HTML>
    <HEAD><TITLE>Reading All Form Data</TITLE></HEAD>
    <BODY>
    <CENTER><H1>Reading All Form Data</H1>
        <FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="phpformdata.php">
        What's your name?<INPUT NAME="Name" TYPE="TEXT">
        <BR><BR>
        Select your favorite fruit(s):
        <SELECT NAME="Food[]" MULTIPLE>
            <OPTION>Apple</OPTION>
            <OPTION>Orange</OPTION>
            <OPTION>Pear</OPTION>
            <OPTION>Pomegranate</OPTION>
        </SELECT>
        <BR><BR>
        <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Submit">
        </FORM>
    </CENTER>
    </BODY>
</HTML>



Figure 6-1. Submitting form data.

[View full size image]



To read the data sent by the user, just use a foreach loop over $_REQUEST. If a particular data item is itself an array, we'll use a nested foreach to display its data, as you see in phpformdata.php, Example 6-2.


Example 6-2. Displaying all the data in a form, phpformdata.html



<HTML>
    <HEAD><TITLE>Retrieving Data From Forms</TITLE></HEAD>
    <BODY><CENTER>
             <H1>Retrieving Data From Forms</H1>
             Here is the data from the form:<BR>
             <?php
                 foreach($_REQUEST as $key => $value){
                     if(is_array($value)){
                         foreach($value as $item){
                             echo $key, " => ", $item, "<BR>";
                         }
                     }
                     else {
                         echo $key, " => ", $value, "<BR>";
                     }
                 }
             ?>
         </CENTER></BODY>
</HTML>



You can see the results in Figure 6-2, where all form data is displayed.


Figure 6-2. Reading data from forms.

[View full size image]









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