Double drop down menu with PHP

Has anyone had any luck getting a double drop down menu to work with PHP?
I can get the menu - which is written in javascript to work, but I can't
figure out how to pass the value of what the user selects to PHP.



What I want to do is have a small online address book for the school
district I work for. Users visiting our page would be able to select from
searching by Last Name, Department or Building. What I wanted was if the
user selects Department a menu opens up with all the departments listed,
same for buildings.



Here is the page with the javascript I am using. It simply redirects the
user to a URL based on their selection.

http://www.trans4mind.com/personal_d...Doublemenu.htm



My only thought is to pass the selection through the URL, but then I have to
turn on register_globals and that makes me nervous.



Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated.



Thanks,

Robert Bowen

Baldwin UFSD

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 00:21:15 +0000, "Robert Bowen"
<bowenr@baldwin.k12.ny.us> wrote:

<snip>


> My only thought is to pass the selection through the URL, but then I
> have to turn on register_globals and that makes me nervous.

You do not have to turn register_globals on to do this, you just have to
access the values through $_GET, $_POST or $_REQUEST depending on which
method the javascript uses. If it appends the users selection to the url,
use $_GET.

To improve security, you can check that the values that are sent are what
you are expecting - the safest way would be to give each item in the menus
a number.. this would result in a url like this:

http://some.domain.com/index.php?menu1=2&menu2=5

These values can be accessed in PHP by:

$choice_1 = $_GET['menu1']; // should be 2

and

$choice_2 = $_GET['menu2']; // should be 5

then, simply use something like:

if(!is_numeric($choice_1){
echo "Selection must be a number";
return FALSE;
}

to check that you have been given a sensible input. You may also want to
check that the number you receive is (a) an integer and (b) is within a
certain range.

Cheers,

Sam.



>
>
> Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert Bowen
>
> Baldwin UFSD
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