Page 288 - Beginning PHP 5.3
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Part III: Using PHP in Practice
Try It Out Create a Multi-Step Form
You can use hidden fields to create a series of forms that guide the user through the data entry process
step by step. Within each form, you can store the current step — so that the script knows what stage
the user has reached — as well as the data already entered by the user in other steps.
Here’s an example that splits the previous registration.php form into three steps:
❑ First name/last name
❑ Gender/favorite widget
❑ Newsletter preference/comments
Save the following script as registration_multistep.php in your document root folder and run
the script in your Web browser. Try filling in some field values and using the Back and Next buttons to
jump between the three steps. Notice how the field values are preserved when you return to a
previously completed step. Figure 9-8 shows the first step of the form, and Figure 9-9 shows the
second step.
To keep things simple, this script doesn’t validate any form fields in the way that registration.php
does. However, you could easily use the same techniques used in registration.php to validate each
step of the form as it is submitted.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>Membership Form</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”common.css” />
</head>
<body>
<?php
if ( isset( $_POST[“step”] ) and $_POST[“step”] >= 1 and $_POST[“step”]
<= 3 ) {
call_user_func( “processStep” . (int)$_POST[“step”] );
} else {
displayStep1();
}
function setValue( $fieldName ) {
if ( isset( $_POST[$fieldName] ) ) {
echo $_POST[$fieldName];
}
}
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