Re: Stroring html form settings

Dianne Yumul wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have some html forms that I save the settings into the database,
> things like which item was selected in the menu and if a checkbox was
> checked. The table looks like this:
>
>  user_id | report_id |                      info
> ---------+-----------+------------------------------------------------
>      111 |         1 | A:::::CHECKED::::CHECKED::::CHECKED::
>      111 |         2 | A:::CHECKED::
>      111 |         3 | A::CHECKED:CHECKED::CHECKED::::CHECKED:::
>
> The info column has the settings separated with a : and consecutive
> colons mean the user didn't make a selection. Would this be the way to
> store them?
>
> I've done some searching and I could use XML (I will read some
> tutorials after writing this email). But there may be other ways and
> I'm just too much of a newbie to know. I'm using Postgresql 8.1.11 and
> PHP on CentOS 5.2.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Dianne
>
Hi,

I would serialize to JSON instead of XML.
http://www.aurore.net/projects/php-json/

A simple json_encode($_POST) might do the trick. You could either use
json_decode() to make a PHP struct of it or send it more or less as it
is to Javascript.

I usually find XML horrible to work with in a web context.

Best regards,
Marcus