Screenflicker Developments

Help Build A Better Form with PHP

September 20th, 2005

Over the last year I’ve been working on improving my knowledge of PHP. The fact that I’m teaching myself, with the help of a few friends, has made this a slow, but rewarding process. Every day I’m introduced to new concepts and methods for achieving the desired result. I’ve come to a bit of a road block and am looking for some help.

Up until recently I’ve gone about things the long way. Generally writing long bits of code, often times it would be very redundant. Needlessly creating larger pages than needed. That has changed over time.

Now I’m realizing the obvious usefulness of functions. Of couse, the goal with programming is to make the most extensible code, and create and keep a library of that code so it can be reused and often, and easily as possible. Whew, that was a mouthful.

So, that being said, I’m looking to conquer a little function that after a form is submitted will check the required fields and display a warning/error message for each required field that was not filled out correctly. If all the required fields were filled out correctly the form information would be emailed.

With the help of Colin Devroe I’m well on my way to getting where I want to be. The function checks the required fields and outputs the correct warning/error. The problem is with the actual emailing of the form values. After the function is finished and there are no errors the information does not get sent.

The Code

This is the particular bit of code that I’ve been working on. The function doesn’t include the email portion of the code but I will put a snippet of it at the end. (The $sendmail variable is set to true earlier in the code).

function checkRequired()
{
    // Declare variables for later
    $stackKeys 		=	array();
    $stackValues 	=	array();
    $arrErrors		=	array();

    // Loop through $_POST
    // Set up hard variables
    foreach ($_POST as $key => $value)
    {
        // Create an array of the keys and their values
        array_push($stackKeys, $key);
        array_push($stackValues, $value);

    } //end foreach

    $stack = array_combine_emulated($stackKeys, $stackValues);
    extract($stack, EXTR_PREFIX_SAME, "pre");

    // Array of required fields
    $arrRequired	=	explode(',', $required);

    // Loop through required fields
    // Check them for value
    for ($i=0; $i< =count($arrRequired); $i++)
    {
        if ( $stack[$arrRequired[$i]] == "" )
        {
            $arrErrors[$i]	=	$arrRequired[$i];
            if (!is_null($arrRequired[$i]))
            {
                echo "<p class=\"error\">Please note: ".
                $arrRequired[$i]." is a required field.</p>";
            }
        }
    } // end for arrRequired
}

checkRequired();

if ( $sendmail )
{
   //Setting the variables for the email body here.
    foreach ($recipient as $send_to) {
        mail ($send_to, $topic[$subject], $text, $headers);
    }
    echo "<p>Thank you for contacting us.
    We will respond to your email as soon as possible.</p>\n";
} else {
    echo $errmsg;
}

UPDATE: Removed an unnecessary second if ( $sendmail ) conditional and combined it with the previous if ($sendmail) conditional.

This is Where You Come In

If anyone has any thoughts I would love to hear them in the comments. I am also aware that there are code libraries out there but, as I’ve been told, the best way to learn is by doing. And with that I open the comments to you.