CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysql
PhpDude
PhpDude

Reputation: 1598

Insert multiple checkboxes into table column

I have a table for documents and part of that is the docs being assigned to a category. The table for doc_list looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `doc_list` (
`doc_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `doc_title` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `doc_content` text NOT NULL,
  `doc_created` datetime NOT NULL,
  `doc_updated` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  `user_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `cat_no` int(11) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf16 AUTO_INCREMENT=122 ;

I am having to manually assign the cat_no (which is the category ID) but want it to be apart of my doc form submission:

    <form action="actions/newDocAdd.php" method="post" id="rtf" name="">
        <input type="text" name="doc_title" id="doc_title" required="required" placeholder="Document Title"/><br />


        <?php 

        try{
            $results = $dbh->query("SELECT * FROM cat_list ORDER BY cat_title ASC  ");

        }catch(Exception $e) {
            echo $e->getMessage();
            die();
        }

        $docs = $results->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

        foreach($docs as $docs){  

        echo '

              <input type="checkbox" name="cat_no" value="2" id="cat_no">'.$docs["cat_title"].'<br><br>

            ';}
        ?>

        <textarea name="doc_content" id="doc_content" placeholder="Document Content" style="display: none;"></textarea>
                <iframe name="editor" id="editor" style="width:100%; height: 600px;"></iframe>

<br><br> 
<input onclick="formsubmit()" type="submit" value="Create Document" name="submit"/>

        </form>

Now it shows me the categories and displays them as checkboxes but because some documents can be apart of more than one category i want to tick the boxes and submit them to the database.

Here is the category table:

CREATE TABLE `cat_list` (
`cat_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `cat_title` varchar(32) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf16 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;

Upvotes: 0

Views: 797

Answers (1)

Devon Bessemer
Devon Bessemer

Reputation: 35337

Assuming documents can have multiple categories:

First you need to group the checkboxes into an array. You can do this by using the same name with brackets.

<input type="checkbox" name="cat_no[]" value="1" />
<input type="checkbox" name="cat_no[]" value="2" />
<input type="checkbox" name="cat_no[]" value="3" />

Now when you submit the form, $_POST['cat_no'] will be an array containing the checked values.

For proper database normalization, you need a new table called something like 'doc_category'. In this table, you would have a composite key of 'doc_id' and 'cat_id':

doc_id  | cat_id
1       | 1
1       | 2
1       | 3

This signifies that doc_id 1 belongs to the categories 1, 2, and 3.

The relationship from documents to categories is called a many-to-many relationship which in databases, requires a third table (intermediate).

Upvotes: 1

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