Question

I have a table of rows and columns on an HTML-based entry form that allows the user to edit multiple records. Each row corresponds to a database record and each column to a database field.

When the user submits the form, the server needs to figure out which request parameter belongs to which row. The method I’ve been using for years is to prefix or suffix each HTML input element’s name to indicate the row it belongs to. For example, all input elements would have the suffix “row1” so that the server would know that request parameters whose names end with “row1” are field values for the first row.

While this works, one caveat of the suffix/prefix approach is that you’re adding a constraint that you can’t name any other elements with a particular suffix/prefix. So I wonder if there’s a better, more elegant approach. I’m using JSP for the presentation layer, by the way.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Current user agents send back the values in the order of the fields as presented to the user.

This means that you could (theoretically) drop the prefix/suffix altogether and sort it out based on the ordering of the values. You’d get something like

/?name=Tom&gender=M&name=Jane&gender=F&name=Roger&gender=M

I don’t know how your framework returns that, but many return it as lists of each value

name = [Tom, Jane, Roger]
gender = [M, F, M]

If you pop an element off of each list, you should get a related set that you can work with.

The downside to this is that it relies on a standard behavior which is not actually required by the specification. Still… it’s a convenient solution with a behavior that won’t be problematic in practice.