Question

I have a form which POSTs to itselft so the user can do things that you would find in a Shopping Cart.

e.g. Increase quantity, select postage type.

My problem is for my form Select element called “postage” whenever the form reloads itself , it forgets what was selected.

All my other fields remember their values using this:

<input type="text" name="postcode" value="<?php echo $_POST['postcode']; ?> " />

How do I use the $_POST value to automatically select the option in the select field that was done by the user?

I tried this:

<select name="postage" selected="<?php echo $_POST['postage']; ?>" >

and this

<select name="postage" value="<?php echo $_POST['postage']; ?>" >

Thanks

Answer 1

You almost got it. You need to set the attribute selected="selected" (the exact form you need technically depends on your HTML doctype, but this is a safe default) on the <option> element if and only if the value of $postage equals the value of the element. So:

<select name="postage">
<option value="foo" 
    <?php if ($_POST['postage'] == "foo") echo 'selected="selected" '; ?>
 >
</select>

Note that this violates the DRY principle because you now have two occurrences of the string "foo" in there, so it’s a prime candidate for refactoring. A good approach would be to keep value/text pairs in an array and iterate over it with foreach to produce the <option> tags.