PHP MySQL Insert form submission

Question

I'm a teacher, and I'm giving Internet-based assignments to
my class. Ideally, I'd like for them to type their findings into a
webpage, press "submit," and have the page's contents go into a
database so I can review their answers before class. The page would
have a couple of paragraphs describing the first problem, then a
textarea where students can enter an answer, then a couple more
paragraphs describing the second problem, then another textarea for
the answer, and so on for about a half dozen problems.

I've set up a database table to capture the answers with
three fields: studentID, questionID, and questionAnswer (there are
two other tables for students and questions). My initial thought
was to ask for the studentID at the top of the page, then have a
separate form for each answer, with a "submit" button at the bottom
of the page, together with buttons for them to print the page and
email themselves a copy of it. But I've learned that it's possible
to submit only one form at a time, so I'm not sure this will work.
I've thought of perhaps creating a separate "submit" button for
each form and making them invisible, then having a button at the
bottom that somehow "presses" each submit button in turn. But I
don't know how to implement that, nor do I know if that's the best
way to do it.

So here are my questions:
(1) Am I on the right track, or is there conceptually a
better way to make this work?
(2) How do I get the studentID from the top of the page into
the database?
(3) How do I get the questionID (which identifies the
question the student is answering) into the database?

This is my first foray into anything like this, and I'm
trying to teach myself with David Powers' book PHP for Dreamweaver
8. So far I can view the database records and insert a single
record into the database with the Insert Record Wizard. I know I
have a ways to go, and I would be grateful for any help and also
for any code or pseudo-code.

Thank you.

Joe Herl

Newsgroup_User · Answer

Joe Herl wrote:> (1) Am I on the right track, or is there conceptually abetter way to make > this work?There are three ways that you could do it. One is to put eachquestion on a separate page, and get the students to answer thequestions in a given order. After inserting the answer to question one, yousend them to the page for question two, and so on.Another way is to put everything in one form and use arraysto gather the answers. To create an array, you use square bracketsafter the name attribute like this:name="question[]"When the form is submitted, you would then need to hand-codeloops to insert each question and answer individually. It's quite easyto do, but you can't automate it with Dreamweaver.The third way to do it is less than ideal, but might be worthconsidering if you know that you will *always* want onlythree questions. Create columns for q1_id, q2_id, q3_id, question1,question2, and question3. You can then insert everything in a singleoperation.> (2) How do I get the studentID from the top of the pageinto the database?It needs to be part of the form. As you have discovered, onlyone form can be submitted at a time.> (3) How do I get the questionID (which identifies thequestion the student is > answering) into the database?Again, it's got to be part of the form. I presume that youwill pull the questions from the database. Retrieve the question ID at thesame time, and store it as a hidden field (see page 280 of my book).-- David PowersAdobe Community ExpertAuthor, "Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8" (friends of ED)http://foundationphp.com/

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