Question

Currently, I am having one page that display query options and does the form validation and another page that process the query and shows the result if validation is successful. I am trying to combine these two pages together such that the user would not need to go back and forth the two pages every time to make some query changes.

The structure of the two page process is as follows:

**Validation Page**
if (post detected)
{
 validate input
 if (no error)
 {
  record query options
  redirect to results page
  exit
 }
 else
 {
  output error message
 }
}
display form

**Results Page**
if (query options are set)
{
 process query
 display results
}
else
{
 redirect to validation page
}

I have seen the concept being implemented simply in search engine pages where the search box and the results are in one page. I am looking to implement something like that using the POST method with a form containing both select and input boxes.

Answer 1

You can just set the form action to itself (or leave it blank along the lines of action = "" and it will point to itself anyhow, then use a simple check to see whether any form data has been submitted to determine if you should show the empty page or the search results:

if(isset($_REQUEST['searchStuffs']) // Not sure if you are GET or POST'ing
{
    if(!empty($_REQUEST['searchStuffs'])
    {
        // do stuff here to get the form result, then display it
    }
    else
    {
        // The form was submitted empty, so show an error
    }
}
else
{
    // Display the normal search/form page as it hasn't been sent.
}

You can also use the following approach (which I would probably use though it is some extra work):

$searchBool=false;
if(isset($_REQUEST['searchStuffs']) // Not sure if you are GET or POST'ing
{
    if(!empty($_REQUEST['searchStuffs'])
    {
        if(...)// valid search criteria
        {
            $searchBool=true;
            // Do stuff to get search results
            $searchResults='some output or data';
        }
    }
}

// Echo normal input form
if($searchBool)
{
    echo $searchResults;
}