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Form Questions /

Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo, swaiba

Accessing POST Parameters


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5 Posts   4955 Views

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katja

Community Member, 46 Posts

11 March 2010 at 3:36am

Hi all,

I can't work out how to access POST parameters of a form (without previously writing them to the database or a session).

I would like to make the content of a page dependent on whether a checkbox has been ticked, but when after submitting the form I redirect to the same page, or another page, the parameters are lost.

Can somebody help? Thank you
Katja

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bummzack

Community Member, 904 Posts

11 March 2010 at 4:26am

Hi

POST parameters are only accessible when you actually receive POST params with your HTTP Request. This usually happens when you submit a Form via POST, but of course these parameters aren't being re-sent for subsequent pages.
If you want some sort of flag to be constantly set after you've received some POST parameters, you should either use the session or a cookie. Do not store sensitive information in the cookie though... well, actually you shouldn't store that in the session either, but it's the lesser of two evils.

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katja

Community Member, 46 Posts

11 March 2010 at 5:59am

Edited: 11/03/2010 8:00am

Thanks very much for your answer. Yes, for subsequent requests the parameters are gone, redirectBack() is already a subsequent request I suppose. Does that mean I cannot use SilverStripe forms in that way? I cannot process a form and show content depending on whether a checkbox in that form has been ticked? - Unless I first write it in a database, cookie or Session (Session::set stores the data in a cookie I think?).

What I wanted to do is ask people to tick a box, and only if that box is ticked they get redirected to the same page showing different content - or other page. But that page should not be accessible by directly calling the URL. Can you give me an idea how best to achieve that?

Thanks again
Katja

P.S. For a moment I was not sure anymore if one can even do it in just PHP, so I wrote this little example. So what I mean is, how could I get the behaviour this script displays, but using SilverStripe? I'm sure it must be possible, but I couldn't figure it out so far.

<?php 

if(isset($_POST["accept"])) {
echo $_POST["accept"];} else { 
?>

<form method="post" action="">
<input type="checkbox" name="accept" id="accept"  />
<label for="accept">I accept the Terms and Conditions</label><br />
<input  type="submit" value="Submit" title="Submit" />
</form>

<?php 
}
?>

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bummzack

Community Member, 904 Posts

11 March 2010 at 9:50am

Hi katja

Ok, I see what you want to do. It should work actually, that's how forms are supposed to work, aren't they? How did you build your form?
Be sure to write a method on your controller that handles the form. Have a look at the following doc-pages for pointers:
http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=tutorial:3-forms
http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=recipes:forms
http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=form

Oh and just to clarify the question regarding the session:
Sessions store data on the server, a cookie is being used to identify the session (only the session-id, but no actual data is stored in the cookie).
Cookies however store whatever data you add to it on the client computer.
Therefore a session is much safer, because you only transfer and store an identifier (session-id) instead of the sensitive data.

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katja

Community Member, 46 Posts

11 March 2010 at 10:15am

Edited: 11/03/2010 10:24am

Thank you very much, this is very helpful. I wasn't aware of the 2nd and 3rd document. - I did have a method to handle the form but somehing with it must have not been right. Sure will manage now. Also interesting about sessions and cookies, I must have read that before but had not taken it in properly.

Katja