Question

I’m creating a dynamic lead capture script.

The form passes the table name, and the rest of the post data.

I’m looking for a way to collect all the post inputs and insert that into a MySQL table without knowing the input names since each ‘lead’ script is different and contains different fields.

The table is already created and contains all the columns necessary for the input.

Any clean ideas?
Cheers!

Answer 1

A quick solution is to serialize an array of your validated post data. This will convert it into a string for storing in your Database.

You can unserialize that string to convert it back into a manageble array.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.serialize.php

The biggest downside is not having the full SQL support that you would have otherwise, by putting data into separate database fields.

I would use a combination of both techniques by putting consistant data like names, email into their own fields and unknown data into another field.

—

Try index identification (if you don’t know the specific names):

$data = array_values($_POST);

$name = $data[0];
$email = $data[1];
$etc = $data[2];

—

Generate SQL string from data. Remember be vigilant with validation and ideally you should use Mysqli bind params to correcly build your query string.

foreach($_POST as $input_name => $input_value){
    //do validation here

    //match columns here
    if($input_name=='name') $cleaned[$input_name] = $input_value;
}

$values_csv = '"'.implode('","',$cleaned).'"';

$sql  = "INSERT INTO table_name VALUES ($values_csv);";