Question

Given this table in my database:

|AnswerID|QuestionID|AnswerText|
|21      |2         |User      |
|22      |2         |Admin     |
|23      |2         |Guest     |
|24      |2         |User2     |

I have created a quiz using PAGINATION to display individual question and its options on each of the page. Example code snippet is as shown below:

$questionID=0;
while ($list = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) 
{
echo $list['QuestionID'] . ":" . $list['QuestionText'] . "<br/>";  
$questionID=$list['QuestionID'];
}
$optionsquery="SELECT AnswerText,AnswerID FROM Options Where QuestionID=".$questionID;
$optionsresult=mysql_query($optionsquery) or die ('Query failed:'. mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($optionsresult))
{
echo "<br>";
echo "<input type='radio' id='radio-" . $row["QuestionID"] . "-" 
      . $row["AnswerID"] . "' name='" . $row["QuestionID"] 
      . "' value='" . $row["AnswerID"] . "' /> 
      <label for='radio-" . $row["QuestionID"] . "-" . $row["AnswerID"] . "'>" 
      . $row["AnswerText"] ."</label><br/>";
      echo "<br>";
}

Here is my objective. Given this relationship AnswerID<->AnswerText,
I want to store the selected radio chosen by the user into my database table of the following format :

|StudentID|QuestionID(e.g: 1)|QuestionID(e.g: 2)|
|678D     |AnswerID(e.g: 11) |AnswerID(e.g: 22) | 
|681D     |AnswerID(e.g: 14) |AnswerID(e.g: 23) |

As shown in the above,I am not hard-coding the questions and options for each page,they are rather taken from my database of tables. All the codes are being written in only one single PHP file. I have googled (on PHP) but I am confused on how to go about achieving my objective. Any code(PHP) snippets will be helpful as I am at loss of ideas. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would suggest you don’t store it in that way (ie one question per column) …. You would be better creating a table that linked student, question and answer :

Student    question     answer 
678D       1            11 
678D       2            22  
681D       1            14 
681D       2            23

This gives you better flexibility – you can increase the number of questions easily for example.

To make processing a submitted form easier I would change the HTML output to this :

echo "<input type='radio' id='question[" . $row["QuestionID"] . "]' name='question[" .
$row["QuestionID"] ."]' value='" . $row["AnswerID"] . "' />";

This would produce inputs as an array which would maan processing them when submitted like this :

$questions = $_POST['question']; // this returns an array like questions[questionid]
foreach ($questions as $qid => $aid) {
    $query = 'INSERT INTO answertable(student,question,answer) VALUES
              ($sudentid,$qid,$aid)';
}

You would need to change the answertable to the name of the table you are using to record answers. And $student would be obtained from the current session (im guessing thats where you are storing it)