Question

I’ve a form with select boxes and a value from database which has been chosen before. Yes I need this value which is chosen to be shown as last chosen inside form. I try using php dom but I’ m not getting anywhere.

So here is the html:

<select name="conf_1">
     <option value="Y">Yes</option>
     <option value="N">No</option>
</select>
<select name="conf_2">
     <option value="text">text</option>
     <option value="alsotext">alsotext</option>
</select>

And now I would like to show the chosen option which is stored in array like this:

$confs = array([1] => N, [2] => text );

Do some code:

loop{
   <option value="$confs[$i]">$confs[$i]</option> has to be appended to <select name="conf_$i">
}

Now I can’t find a way to do this. I’ve tried using php dom but I don’t know how to select element by name attribute and then loop trough so I can’t make a real php example. I just would not know where to start.

If someone just has a way to do this please enlighten me!?

Done it with this code inspired by @Markus I.:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML($form);
    $xPath = new DOMXPath($dom);

    foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('select') as $select) {
        $name = $select->getAttribute('name');
        $name = str_replace('conf_', '', $name);

        foreach($xPath->query('./option', $select) as $option) {
            if ($option->getAttribute('value') == $confs[$name]) {
                $option->setAttribute('selected', 'selected');
            }
        }
    }

    $form = $dom->saveHTML($dom);

    echo $form;

Answer 1

I prefer to load the hole template into a DOM and modify it: (Code not tested!)

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML('<yourTemplateXML />');
$xPath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$data = array('conf1' => 'N', 'conf2' => 'text');


foreach ($xPath->query('//select') as $select) {
    foreach($xPath->query('./option', $select) as $option) {
        if ($option->getAttribute('value') == $data[$select->getAttribute('name')]) {
            $option->setAttribute('selected', 'selected');
        }
    }
}

echo $dom->saveXML();

I wrote a class, which can handle all field-types. Note this is only samplecode. On production you should take care if the key in your data-array exists and so on.

This has a nice Side-effect: Because you set the Value via dom, it protects your form from XSS