I've been search for a solution to this for a while and haven't been able to find one.
My company has quite a few webtools that we use for our jobs and I have been tasked with combining them all into a dashboard page. One of my coworkers started this project but never finished it before he left, so now I have to figure it out and there are quite a few problems.
The dashboard page is composed of a couple of sidebars, plus a "main" element. The sidebar includes a bunch of links that when clicked load specific php pages into the "main" via a call to jQuery AJAX. Here's a simplified example:
<html>
<head>
<script>
$(function() {
$("#pageToLoad").click(function() {
$.ajax({
url: "some_directory/pageToLoad.php",
success: function(result) {
$("#main").html(result);
}
});
});
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<a href="#pageToLoad" id="pageToLoad">Load Page</a>
<main id="main"></main>
</body>
</html>
The problem here is that most of our tools use forms that are submitted via POST and then parsed with PHP (has to be php because it connects to our database to get information needed). Here's a simplified example of a tool page:
<?php
$action = htmlspecialchars($_SRVER["PHP_SELF"]);
function getResults() {
if(isset($_POST["infoForQuery"])) {
//Do some sort of query to database and print out results
}
}
?>
<body>
<form action="<?php echo $action;?>" method="post">
<input type="text" name="infoForQuery">
<input type="submit" value="submit" />
</form>
<div>
<?php getResults();?>
</div>
</body>
I need to be able to use these tools inside the dashboard page, but whenever I try to submit a form, it just reloads the entire dashboard page, resulting in the POST data not existing (maybe this is because the PHP code is run before ajax loads the content into the dashboard page? not sure).
I know I can use AJAX to send the POST like so:
$(function() {
$('form').on('submit', function (e) {
e.preventDefault();
$.ajax({
type: 'post',
url: 'some_directory/pageToLoad.php',
data: $('form').serialize(),
success: function() {
alert('form submitted');
}
});
});
});
However, this does not allow me to use the data collected in the form to query a database and print results out on the page.
Is it possible to accomplish this without having to leave the dashboard page, and if so, how?
Edit: I believe I've figured it out! What I wasn't realizing was that when I overrode the submit function and used ajax to send the post instead, I could actually retrieve the result of that post and put it into my page. Here's what I did:
<script>
$('form').on('submit', function (e) {
e.preventDefault();
$.ajax({
url: 'some_directory/pageToLoad.php',
type: 'post',
data: $('form').serialize(),
success: function(result) {
$("#main").html(result);
}
});
});
</script>
