Question

I have built a contact form using CakePHP on my site. The controller logic is as follows:

<?php

class ContactController extends AppController
{
    var $helpers = array ('Html','Form');

    var $components = array ('Email','RequestHandler');

    var $name = 'Contact';

    function beforeFilter()
    {
        parent::beforeFilter();

        $this->Auth->allow(array('*'));  
    }

    function index()
    {
        if ($this->RequestHandler->isPost())
        {
            $this->Contact->set($this->data);
            if ($this->Contact->validates())
            {
                $this->Email->to = '###';  
                $this->Email->subject = 'Contact message from ' . $this->data['Contact']['name'];  
                $this->Email->from = $this->data['Contact']['email'];  

                $this->Email->send($this->data['Contact']['message']);

                $this->render('success');
            }
        }
    }

}

?>

What I want to do is when a user submits the form is show another view file such as success.ctp but what happens is even though they have a new view they could refresh the page and send the data again and again. How do I stop this…

Can anyone help? Thanks

Answer 1

after you process their form data, redirect them to the same contact page (to avoid the refresh problem)

If you’re not aware, you can setFlash to show a success message. But if you want to customize it the way you want, you can write a variable to Session to signal the view.

function index()
{
    if ($this->RequestHandler->isPost())
    {
        $this->Contact->set($this->data);
        if ($this->Contact->validates())
        {
            $this->Email->to = '###';  
            $this->Email->subject = 'Contact message from ' . $this->data['Contact']['name'];  
            $this->Email->from = $this->data['Contact']['email'];  
            $this->Email->send($this->data['Contact']['message']);
            $this->Session->write('Contact.postmessage', true);
            $this->redirect(array('action'=>'index'));
        }
    }
    $this->Session->delete('Contact.postmessage');
}

And in the view:

if($this->Session->check('Contact.postmessage'){
   // write out content of success.ctp
  }else{
   // write out form
  }