Mark Hensler — Tue, 21 May 2002 06:52:26 +0000

My personal choice would be to use a DB. But using the GET method (as it looks like your using) should do just fine.

It looks like your loosing data from previous pages by not including them in the forms. You need to add hidden fields in your forms to keep the data. Such like...

( page 2 )
<form action="blah.php" method="GET/POST">
    <input type="hidden" name="services[]" value="Design" />
    <input type="hidden" name="services[]" value="Logo" />
    <input type="radio" name="logo" value="yes_logo" checked>Continue with professional design<br>
    <input type="radio" name="logo" value="no_logo" >Cancel logo request<br><br><input TYPE=submit NAME=submit VALUE="Go to Step 3 >>" >
</form>

arin — Tue, 21 May 2002 04:01:54 +0000

I'm assuming that you want to make this so that, if you select one or more items in step 1, the appropriate data entry boxes will appear on the one page (it's not much different if you want each on a seperate page).

This is actually not a trivial problem. I remember starting out with PHP trying to do things like this (oh so long ago ), and failing miserably. So I'll give you a few pointers to start you off.

There are actually several ways to solve this problem. Probably the simplest method is to use HTML Forms with PHP. With this method, you'll want to use lots and lots of tags, and make sure you specify your FORM tag like , so that you don't have to send a really long URL to the browser, but you may want to leave a parameter such as ?step=2, so that people know where they're up to. There is some useful documentation in the PHP manual (http://www.php.net) about using Forms & PHP, and particularly some info on Forms and arrays.

Another way would be to use a database. This is a significant step up from the Forms method above, but for complex tasks it can make everything much easier. The MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) and PHP docs don't really cover this much, and I taught myself this by tearing appart php-nuke and other database-driven systems . But there are increasingly more resources available.

You could also use PHP's Sessions (like the s=..... numbers in this forum's URL). I don't have much experience with these, so you'll need to find somebody else to help out. Similarly, you can use Cookies to do this, but many people don't trust cookies, so your mileage here may vary considerably.

Have fun!
arin