Question

I’m looking for the best practice for saving a dynamic HTML form. The fields of the form are added the the page by AJAX. Each field is similar to:

<input type="text" name="field_12" />

Where, in this case, “12” is the primary key for the field in the database.

I plan to send these fields via POST back to the server for saving. When it’s time to save, I do not know the name attributes that will be coming over.

I can think of two ways to do this.

1. Have a hidden item with a list of field ids. I can then parse it before doing the inserts.
   <input type="hidden" name="fieldIds" value="1,2,12,14" />

2. Query the database for the expected field ids, then do the inserts based on that.

I can see advantages and disadvantages of both scenarios. What is the best practice in this situation?

I’m using classic ASP on an IIS server, although, I don’t think that’s a factor here.

Answer 1

make input fields like

<input type="hidden" name="field[]" value="12" />
<input type="hidden" name="field[]" value="13" />
<input type="hidden" name="field[]" value="14" />
...

it will become array on server side

and loop it through, then insert