Question

I have a form on a page where the user has inputs to edit a XML file, the action for the form is to send it to a separate PHP script where the editing takes place after they hit submit. The script will either write successful or fail, either way I have it redirect back to the form page via a header. Is there an easy way to pass back a confirmation or failure message to the form page? I can do it in the URL but I rather keep that clean looking.

Answer 1

The way that I’ve seen it done (and I personally use) is simply sessions.

// process something if($success) {     flash_message('success','Did whatever successfully.'); } else {     flash_message('error','Oops, something went wrong.'); } header('Location: whatever.php'); 

Then somewhere else, in your library or function file or whatever:

function flash_message($type, $message) {     // start session if not started     $_SESSION['message'] = array('type' => $type, 'message' => $message); } 

Then in the view/page you could do:

if(isset($_SESSION['message'])) {     printf('<div class='message %s'>%s</div>', $_SESSION['message']['type'],     $_SESSION['message']['message']);     unset($_SESSION['message']); } 

This is pretty basic but you could expand it from there if you want multiple messages and so on. Bottom line is that I believe sessions are best for this.