Question

I am looking for a “neat” (clean) way to show a status message after submitting a form.

For example, if a user updates their profile, I want to show a DIV with the text “Your Profile Has Been Updated!”.

Right now I am getting this done this way:

After posting the data and either inserting or updating the database table, I do a header(“Location: updateprofile.php?status=updated”);

This works just fine and dandy, however it isn’t very clean. I don’t want the query string.

Another method I tried was to set a variable of $submitted=1; and not do a redirect after. However, when a user is updating their information it still shows the old information in the form fields until a refresh. So this doesn’t work either.

I know I could use AJAX to submit the form and accomplish it that way, however, for what I am doing I do not want to use AJAX. I want a server side solution.

My only other thought is having to set a $_SESSION variable then somehow remove it after showing the status update.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Tony

Answer 1

Most of the time this is handled through session variables that store whatever flash messages need to be shown.

In a shared view (layout, element) put something like

<?php
    if (isset($_SESSION['flashMessage']) && !empty($_SESSION['flashMessage'])) {
        echo <<<EOF
        <div class="flashMessage">
            {$_SESSION['flashMessage']}
        </div>
EOF;
        unset($_SESSION['flashMessage']);
    }
?>

Set $_SESSION['flashMessage'] to “Your profile has been updated.” in whatever code is handling your form submissions.