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PHP Forms Class: All Tied Together

In the last few examples concerning the forms, I've gone through how to create the Forms class and how to create a method to utilize that class.

To refresh your memory:
http://dinocajic.blogspot.com/2015/06/php-forms-class.html
http://dinocajic.blogspot.com/2015/06/php-forms-class-in-action.html

This time, I'm going to show you how I tie it all in by creating a real life example.

The following class was created as part of a larger web-application that inserts a purchase order into the database. It's very brief and the next class will add items to that purchase order.

What we want to store is:

  • PO #
  • Date that the shipment is scheduled to arrive
  • Which location is the shipment arriving to
  • What's the current status of the shipment. If it's ordered from China, for example, there can be a few different types of statuses:
    • Water
    • Rail
    • Truck or
    • Hasn't Shipped
Overview of the class AddPackingSlip
  • I like to take the Java approach and import all of my classes at the beginning of the code before I start my class.
  • Initiate all of the required properties.
  • __construct() is called on object instantiation ($obj = new AddPackingSlip()) to Instantiate the required classes
  • main() method is called from the file that instantiated the $obj ($obj->main())
  • main() checks if the form has been submitted
  • If it hasn't, it'll call the form() method that generates the form with the help of the Forms Class that we've created and imported
  • Once the form is submitted, checkForErrorsAndSanitize() method is called; as you can probably guess, it checks for errors, sanitizes the $_POST values and assigns them to the initiated properties. If any test returns anything other than the requested value, it'll set an error message to the $errors[] array and assign the name of the field as the key.
  • The $errors[] array is returned and if it's not empty, the form() method is called again and $errors[] is passed as the parameter to display the errors on the page.
  • Once everything checks out, the sanitized values are inserted into the database and a confirmation message is displayed letting the user know that everything was successful.
  • The mysqli connection is closed.


I may revisit this code and show you a better way to handle errors at a later time.

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