Question

I hope I’m not posting a duplicate question but I’ve looked around (and googled as well!) and nothing has given me the answer I’m looking for.

I have a form in HTML. When the user submits the form the values get stored with mysql under their user account for the site.

The issue is, I’d like the user to be able to go back and edit the form any time they like.

I could certainly just populate the form with values from php when the users review the form, but it gets tricky when I try to populate a file input field (and the file has been saved in mysql using the blob type). Not to mention that I’d like to do this as cleanly as possible.

Ideally it would be nice if there was a convenient module for reviewing forms that have already been submitted in JQuery per se.

Can anyone offer any advice? Thanks in advance!

Edit:
Here’s a good example of what I mean – in chrome if I fill out a form and redirect to the next page after hitting submit, if I hit back I come back to the form and it’s still filled out with the information I entered previously! Could I invoke this behaviour whenever I want to, as opposed to only when the user hits back?

Answer 1

Unless someone has a better way, at the moment I’m using a combination of 2 things:

1) Utilizing the $_SESSION variable
2) Setting the “name” attribute of every input in the form to the name of the field it corresponds to in the database.

This way I can loop through all the values dynamically instead of hardcoding them all in. Some input types (like file) are exceptional and will be handled on their own. Other that I can do something like this:

To insert into mysql:

$fields = array();
$values = array();
foreach ($_POST as $field => $value) {
    $fields[] = $field;
    $values[] = addslashes($value);
}

$fieldString = 'Table_Name('.implode(', ', $aFields).')';
$valueString = "VALUES('".implode("', '", $aValues)."')";
mysql_query("INSERT INTO $fieldString $valueString");

Reviewing the form is somewhat similar. I am using javascript to hook into document.onload. I need to pass javascript the records from mysql so that it may populate the form. Then it’s a simple matter of getting elements by their name and assigning them their values that were passed from php.