Question

I have trouble to figure out a php problem described below.

I have one PHP page that lists several users in a table (the list is generated by PHP). Next to every user, there is a “remove” button. By clicking this button, the page will redirect to a new removal confirmation page, and therefore we need to pass along information about the specifically chosen user.

My idea was to use a $_SESSION array that stores all the information about the chosen user (e.g. first, last name, user ID etc.), but I cannot figure out how the array should store the information for one specific user. Right now I’m using a while loop to generate the list of users:

      while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($data)) { 
  // Display the user data
  echo '<td><strong>' . $row['first_name'] . '</strong></td>';
  echo '<td><strong>' . $row['last_name'] . '</strong></td>';
  echo '<td>' . $row['nickname'] . '</td>';
  ...

  echo '<td><a href="remove.php">Remove</a>'; // button should be here
  echo '</td></tr>';
  }
 echo '</table>';

How should I make sure that THAT particular Remove link fills the $_SESSION array with that user’s information? Right now, the while loop only creates a bunch of identical remove buttons that do not differentiate between the different users listed in the table. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Using a session is a bad approach in this situation. You probably just want to pass the user id to the removal confirmation page by appending the user id to the linked url:

echo '<td><a href="remove.php?user_id='.$row['id'].'">Remove</a>';

On the removal confirmation page, you can now access the passed user id with $_GET[“user_id”]