Question

I have a database with a number of tables, dbtable.

I’m creating a form with php and I layout the form using <table>.

Each <tr> in the table corresponds to one row in a dbtable.

So, the more rows in a dbtable, the more tr-tags.. you get it.

My question is:

How should I name the input-tags to be able to use the POST-variables to update the database accordingly?

At the moment, I’m naming them 1_name, 2_name, 3_name for one dbtable data
then 1_1_valueA, 1_1_valueB, 1_2_valueA, 1_2_valueB for data that belongs to 1_name, 2_name etc.

But I feel this is not such a good approach..

Answer 1

name them like this:

item[0][db_row_id]
item[0][value_a]
item[0][value_b]

item[1][db_row_id]
item[1][value_a]
item[1][value_b]

where the numbers 0 and 1 etc are just assigned as indicies in a POST array

you will be able to retrieve all of the items with $_POST['item']

or in CI $this->input->post('item')

and it will look like this:

array(
 array('db_row_id'=>val,'value_a'=>val,'value_b'=>val),
 array('db_row_id'=>val,'value_a'=>val,'value_b'=>val)
)