Question

I have a table displaying results from a database, and I am adding some paging/navigation buttons to it, such as ‘prev’, ‘next’, etc. These are being constructed for now as submit input buttons that are wrapped with a form tag and some hidden inputs to pass the needed querystring values back to the page itself, which means each form and element in the form should have an ID attribute.

Now, I’d love to add the navigation to both the top and bottom of the table, so I’ve modularized the navigation generation into a single routine I call whenever needed. This of course leads to duplicate form and element IDs in the page when there is more than one navigation bar included.

I’ve thought of passing some ‘count’ parameter to the routine so that when generating the HTML it could append that value to the IDs, and there are other solutions, such as using a global counter (ugly), etc, but I thought I’d poll the crowd and see what others have done in this situation.

Thanks,

Paul

Answer 1

There might have been some confusion it seems over what I was looking for, but in a nutshell, a simple way to avoid the duplicate ID issue when using a form-based paging solution that can be displayed multiple times on the same page (above and below tabular data, for example). My solution is to model it after the PHPMyAdmin paging, in that I simply remove the IDs for the form elements for now and reference the data being passed via the name attribute, which allows for duplicates.