Question

I suspected this wouldn’t work, and it didn’t – but I can’t seem to find a similar question anywhere so here we go. I had a if else statement that checked to see if they couldn’t log in it would show why (errors), and if there were, they would be echoed out, and otherwise, $_SESSION would be assigned a user id (having already been started beforehand) that was retrieved from a variable that equates to a function which queries the mySQL db. and the page would redirect to an account page, as so:

if (!empty($errors)) {
    foreach ($errors as $error) {
        echo $error . '<br />'; .
    }
} else {
    $_SESSION['user_id'] = $login;
    header('Location: you/default.php');
    exit();
}

The problem is this login form is in a dropdown menu on the homepage (rather than being a page in it’s own right), and if they can’t log in (incorrect password, an unfilled field, etc), I want to redirect to the login.php page and then display the errors, so I tried adding header('Location: login.php'); before the foreach statement, but it just redirected to login.php, like I expected, and didn’t bring the errors along with it.

I suspect this may be a job for AJAX or something other than PHP… ideas?

Answer 1

I actually figured out a way to do this myself. In my case if there were errors (if (!empty($errors))), I applied them to the $_SESSION superglobal as $_SESSION['errors'].

It then redirects the page to login.php where a simple if statement echos them out there:

    if (isset($_SESSION['lqerrors'])) {
    $lqerrors = $_SESSION['lqerrors'];
        foreach ($lqerrors as $lqerror) {
            echo $lqerror, '<br />'; 
        }
    unset($lqerrors,$lqerror,$_SESSION['lqerrors']);
} 

Easy!