Hello me, it’s me again,
I have hung around on this board for a while now and I have seen some problems pop up over and over again. I’d like to try and tackle one here: the problem of updating many records (in a database in this example) from one HTML form.
Imagine we have this table in the database:
Table: User
Id
Username
Password
First_name
Last_name
Birthdate
Email
Subscr_dateImagine you’re writing something for the administrator so that they can reset all passwords from one form.
( you need a reason, right? )
For every User-record in the database we want a line with the username, first_name/last_name, subscription date and a ‘Reset password’ checkbox.
[php]
$dbh = mysql_connect( $host, $user, $pass ); // Connect to a database
if ( mysql_error() )
{ echo "Cannot connect to database on [$host] as [$user] : ".mysql_error();
exit;
}
mysql_select_db( $database ); // Select the correct database
$query = “select id, username, first_name, last_name, subscr_date from user”;
$result = mysql_query( $query );
if ( mysql_error() )
{ echo "Cannot run query [$query] : ".mysql_error();
exit;
}
// Create the form
echo ‘’;
echo ‘
| Reset | Username | Name | Join date |
| ’. ‘ | ’;’. $row[‘username’]. ‘ | ’;’. $row[‘first_name’]. ’ '. $row[‘last_name’]. ‘ | ’;’. $row[‘subscr_date’]. ‘ | ’;
echo ‘’;
echo ‘’;
[/php]
As you can see the 'id’s are passed as an array.
That done you need to write the PHP script that is going to process this form. We named it ‘sendnewpass.php’.
[php]
$id_array = $_POST[‘id’]; // First get all the id’s
foreach( $id_array as $id ) // Loop through them
{ if ( array_key_exists( $id.’_reset’, $_POST ) && $_POST[$id.’_reset’] == ‘on’ )
{ resetPasswordAndSendMail( $id ); // This is a function that resets the password and sends an email
} // to the user.
}
…
function resetPasswordAndSendMail( $id )
{ $password = “CatchATurian”;
$query = “update User set password=’$password’ where id=’$id’”;
$result = mysql_query( $query );
if ( mysql_error() )
{ echo "Cannot run query [$query] : ".mysql_error();
exit;
}
// and here some code that digs up the emailadres and sends a notification with the new password.
// ( I leave that to you )
}
[/php]
In this example I only access the checkbox via the id, but I hope you see how you can keep lots of form-fields together this way.
I hope this is going to help someone. If you need more explanation, contact me.
Good luck! ;D
O.