Question

This is more of a PHP design question. Basically, I’m going to have a form with a drop down menu and a submit button. I am going to have an infinite amount of drop down options; obviously, not an infinite, but there’s basically going to be a drop down menu with ALOT of options. These “options” are individual reports that I want to run.

So, the user selects from the drop down menu, for example, “Articles without approval”, which I want to tie to a function in my functions.php file that runs the SQL for this and outputs everything nicely in a table.

My problem is, how do I do this without have a huge if/else statement in my main document that that basically says “If the submit button is equal to “Articles without approval”, do this”, etc etc for every drop down option. I need something dynamic, without a bunch of if/else statements.

Am I overthinking this?

Answer 1

Unless you want to wrap all of your app into a framework that might be more conducive to this sort of thing, you’ll probably find it easier to call the function dynamically.

Suppose you had functions called articlesWithoutApproval() and articlesWithApproval(). Then, you could do something like this:

<form action="handler.php" method="post">
    <select name="reportName">
        ...
        <option value="articlesWithoutApproval">Articles without approval</option>
        <option value="articlesWithApproval">Articles with approval</option>
        ...
    </select>
</form>

Then, in handler.php, do:

<?php
function articlesWithoutApproval(){ ... }
function articlesWithApproval(){ ... }

// clean variables, etc

if( isset( $_POST['submit'] ) && $_POST['submit'] ) ) {

    $func_name = $_POST['reportName']; // equal to "articlesWithoutApproval"
    echo $func_name(); // call the function dynamically
    // above evaluates to `echo articlesWithoutApproval();` etc
}
?>