what is the best technique

when creating and parsing forms. I have looked at quite a few books with different authors and each of them have a different approach to getting something done. So As i am learning this stuff it has become a little frustrating because each person has a different style.

So maybe this question is for someone with some expierance.


A form goes through the same couple of steps every time.

one way to do it s to write a form at the first step as simple html and when you submit it could be held in hidden fields and sent to an output.php then to a confirm.php.

you can also make the form start out as a form.php then parse directly to a "this data was inserted into the database" page.

I guess my question is if I am going to have a login page that goes into an admistration page and then customer service people will have the ability to add customers , delete customers or edit customers should i display the form first through a php page to a php page or go html - output.php then finally to a confirm.php?

I guess these are preferences in the way you can strategize on how to run through your basic forms . Anyway, its an interesting discussion and if anyone that can understand what the heck i am talking about above could maybe shed some direction form would be appreciated.

This is to me a matter of personal style and the requirements of security needed. Generally speaking I do most of my form handling on the same page as the form (unless I am using templates). I like having everything in one place (tend not to like to include things)- though that goes against the OOP model.

The only time I usually deviate from this is when I need a higher layer of security. This allows me tighter control of access to my db and a little more flexibility.

After working on a very large project which has taken better than a year, my preferred method is to have pages refer to themselves, keep the formatting/database connection/GUI/session calls in a header file, and include function repositories for page-specific functions.

I tend to have a form call its own page, and parse the get/post variables whenever the page is called to determine what it should be doing.