Question

I have created 15 fields in my MySQL Table and would like to give the end user the option of using a form to add up to that many items. However, to keep the interface clean, I would like to only present them with maybe 2-3 Textboxes and give them a button that would allow them to add more should they need it.

I don’t believe adding the textboxes to the form using Javascript would be an issue, but I am confused as to how to process it exactly once I have submitted the POST Data to the form handler. Can anyone shed some light on the best way to go about this?

Answer 1

If you have to use a normal POST variable containing all the form values, you should be able to do something like this:

When generating the textboxes with the server language and/or javascript, the way they are sent to the server is with their name attribute. If you provide a consistent way of naming the elements, you can “combine” things with numbers. For example, if you provide 2 textboxes every time the user clicks “Add” (one for “foo” and one for “bar”), then you can increment the number at the end to make sure they match.

<input type="text" name="foo1" /><input type="text" name="bar1" />
<input type="text" name="foo2" /><input type="text" name="bar2" />
and so on

Then on the server, you need to find every item in the POST variable that starts with “foo” and “bar”

for (item in POST) {
    if (item startswith "foo") {
        // Extract the number at the end, and find the related "bar"
    }
}