Question

I will preface my question by stating that I know it’s a strange request but it cannot however be done otherwise for this particular project.

I have a list of a few hundred checkboxes as part of a form. Outside of the form, I have a link going to a separate page that I would like to append the list of checked checkboxes to. example:

<form name="sampleForm" method="POST" action="process.php">
    <input type="checkbox" name="checkbox_1" />
    <input type="checkbox" name="checkbox_2" />
    <input type="checkbox" name="checkbox_3" />
</form>

<a href="otherPage.php>Alternate Page</a>

What I need is for when someone clicks on the Alternate Page link, the checkboxes are appended like a GET statement:

otherpage.php?checkbox_1=1&checkbox_2=1

Or something along these lines, any suggestions that would solve a problem like this would be great. I am not interested in rewriting large portions of code or replacig this with a submit button.

Answer 1

You can do it like this by attaching javascript to the link. Change the HTML to this:

<a id="otherPageLink" href="otherPage.php>Alternate Page</a>

Add this javascript:

$("#otherPageLink").click(function() {
    var checkStr = [];
    $("form[name='sampleForm'] input[type='checkbox']").each(function() {
        checkStr.push(this.name + "=" + this.checked ? 1 : 0);
    });
    window.location = this.href + "?" + checkStr.join("&");
    return(false);
});

This works as follows:

1. Attaches a click handler to the link.
2. Gets all the checkboxes in that form
3. Iterates through each checkbox, building a string for each one based on it’s value and putting them all into an array
4. Get the original URL for the link and combine it with all the query parameters for the checkboxes and go to that URL
5. return false to prevent normal processing of the link