Question

I am making a page that has a bunch of fields that allows the user to enter in information and submit it to a database. This page is called ‘add.php’ I created a ‘form’ tag and had the information posted to another page called ‘process.php’ where the information is collected, then inserted into the database. I want the user to know whether it was successful or not, so I was wondering how to tell the user something specific on the ‘add.php’ page. like “insertion successful!” at the top of the page.

I thought of including the ‘process.php’ code in ‘add.php’, then calling the ‘add.php’ in the action of the form, but the code gets called the first time the page is loaded, which inserts a completely blank entry into the database.

Should I implement some sort of flag that is only set to true after the ‘submit’ button is clicked? Or is there another way to update the page and tell the user the status of the insertion?

I can paste the relevant code as needed. 🙂

Thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming that you are using the post method in your form and php, you can simply check if a post was made:

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'POST')
{
  // form was posted, process and display output
}
else
{
  // nothing was posted, normal get request, show form
}