在没有javascript的情况下将项目的多个部分添加到表单中？

Question

Thanks everybody. (For some reason I couldn't up vote answers, so everyone wins today :] thanks again!)

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Complete php and javascript novice here, apologize up front for anything half-witted.

I have a portion of a user's profile in which I'd like the user to be able to add additional items of the same thing, with slightly different conditions.

For example, let's say it's favorite books. A fieldset contains some checkboxes for genre and an input text box for the title of a book. After the user checks a genre and fills in a title, they can add the book to their set of favorite books and then have the option to add another. When done adding books, they move on to the next fieldset, complete the form and submit.

How is this done? And more-importantly, is it possible without javascript?

Without JS, I understand this probably entails a lot of reloading of the page to add the items, regardless I'm more confused about how the $_POST data is handled, both before and after the submit.

Sorry for such an open ended question, really just looking for someone to point me in the right direction, as searching for this topic proved to be a bit difficult.

Thanks.

Some Clarification I'm trying to develop an application that is as independent of javascript as possible. In that sense, I don't know if it's possible to add the new items with PHP alone. My sense is the fieldset in question could have it's own submit button, the action of which POSTS to the page itself (no DB interaction, etc), and variables like $book_genre1, $book_title1 are populated in the page. Then, the "official" submit is sent later, which actually adds the POST data, which contains the books array, to the DB. But I don't know if that is a safe procedure or good logic to begin with.

Answer 1

In reply to the above answer, if that is exactly what you need since I seem to have a different idea.

You simply store each addition in an array stored inside a session variable, and in each page load, parse the data into readable html.

$_SESSION['form'][] = serialized_form_data; 

On each load,

foreach ($_SESSION['form'] as $form) {
    unserialize_data_and_create_html(); 
}

add_new_form_element();

I'm assuming you want to show the user already filled forms so he can deal with them as he wishes.

This is a better implementation than what I thought of earlier. I wanted to implement a db version.

Sorry for the delay. I can't comment since I'm mobile (js issues) so I decided to edit instead.

You can simply use the $_SESSION['form'] for your inserts.

A simple foreach will work as well. However, remember to sanitize each value properly before inserting it. That's the key.

If you use prepared statements with binding, you have the advantage of clean input as well as better database performance.