Form with dynamic fields?

Dave!

Hey folks,

I'm just working on a small project for my dad at the moment, which is a kind of repair/sales form that he might use for work. Essentially the fields/flow is as follows:

1. Select a customer from a dropdown, and several related fields are automatically populated
2. Choose which of a few checkbox options are applicable
3. Add a number of products/parts/items to a list for that 'call'

#1 is grand

#2 - I'm wondering what is the best way to store selected checkboxes in a single field in a table. This actually seems like a good solution, but I'd like to follow best practice.

[PHP]$colors = mysql_real_escape_string(implode(',', $_POST));[/PHP]

I'll obviously need to be able to access and view the saved form again, so the explode() function should do that.

#3 - Would this be the same kind of deal actually? I would probably have a dropdown menu, and if an item is selected I'll use AJAX to query the 'parts' table and get the price, etc. But really I just need to store the item id, don't I? In which case the above solution would work again.

Unless it's really horrific practice (which I suspect it is), I'd like to keep each 'form' / submission in the one table rather than having another table with e.g. id - form_id - part_id

Thanks

Giblet

You could use a bitflags

So if you have

RED = 1,
GREEN = 2,
WHITE = 4,
BLACK = 8

If the user stored green + black, the bitfield value would be 10 which can be stored.
Using bitwise operations, you can figure out that 10 = BLACK + GREEN