Question

Currently I’m working on a textbook ordering html form with PHP

User shown a list of textbook and theres a Quantity dropdown menu for each textbook (they can select to order 1 quantity or 2,3 or 4)

Each textbook have a unqiue textbookId number.

How can I create a html form which can determine which textbook they order and the quantity they order?

I usually solve this kind of problem by creating multiple html form (each form contain hidden field of textbookId) but the problem is that’s there will be multiple submit button.

But I only one submit button for the whole textbook list.

Can someone please help me 🙂 thanks so much in advance

If possible can you show me how to process the data in php as well.

Cheers

Here is my current html form code:

<div class="tables">
    <form action="process-order" id="login-form" method="get" name="login-form"></form>
    <table class="orders">
      <tr>
        <th>textbookId</th>
        <th>Subject</th>
        <th>Title</th>
        <th>Price</th>
        <th>Quantity</th>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>English</td>
        <td>English ABC</td>
        <td>33.00</td>
        <td>
          <div align="center">
            <select name="mydropdown">
              <option value="0">0</option>
              <option value="1">1</option>
              <option value="2">2</option>
              <option value="3">3</option>
              <option value="4">4</option>
            </select>
          </div>
        </td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>Math</td>
        <td>Math SignPost</td>
        <td>122.00</td>
        <td>
          <div align="center">
            <select name="mydropdown">
              <option value="0">0</option>
              <option value="1">1</option>
              <option value="2">2</option>
              <option value="3">3</option>
              <option value="4">4</option>
            </select>
          </div>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Next">
    </form>
</div>

Answer 1

One possibility is to encode the book ID into the submitted form element e.g. <select name="book_1">
for the book 1.

<tr>
    <td>1</td>
    <td>English</td>
    <td>
    <div align="center">
    <select name="book_1">
    <option value="0">0</option>
    <option value="1">1</option>
    <option value="2">2</option>
    <option value="3">3</option>
    <option value="4">4</option>
    </select>
    </div>
    </td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td>2</td>
    <td>Math</td>
    <td>
    <div align="center">
    <select name="book_2">
    <option value="0">0</option>
    <option value="1">1</option>
    <option value="2">2</option>
    <option value="3">3</option>
    <option value="4">4</option>
    </select>
    </div>
    </td>
</tr>

PHP processes the books as follows:

<?php
$books = array();
if ($_GET) {
    foreach ($_GET as $key => $value) {
        $keys = split("_", $key);
        if (count($keys) == 2 && $keys[0] == "book") {
            $id = $keys[1];
            $books[$id] = $value;
        }
    }
}
// echo "Ordered: <br />";
// foreach ($books as $id => $value) {
//    echo "$id : $value <br />";
// }
?>