php, html generate form from mutiple variables

Answer 1

I will assume getValue is a custom function. My recommendation would be the following:

 <?php
 // arrays to facilitate foreach loop
 $hidden_fields = array('siteId', 'itemid', 'bidqty'); // store hidden field names
 $hidden_values = array(); // store the hidden field values

 foreach ($hidden_fields as $key => $value) {
  // fill the values array using the values from fields array
  $hidden_values[$value] =  getValue($value, $localurl);
 }


 <?php
 echo "
 form action=\"http://$domain/mailer/create.php\" name=\"create\" method=\"post\" />
 input type=\"hidden\" name=\"random\" value=\"$random\" />";

 // output hidden fields
 foreach ($hidden_values as $key => $value) {
  echo '<input type="hidden" name="', $key, '" value="', $value, '" />';
 }
 ?>

You could do this with a single array, but I feel this is more flexible.

Answer 2

Yes there is a way. Add all your values into an array and use the PHP function array_walk.

eg:

$hiddenVars = array(
   'siteId' => getValue("siteId", $localurl),
   'itemid' => getValue("itemid", $localurl),
   .....
);

function outputHiddenFields(&$val, $key) {
   echo '<input type="hidden" name="', $key, '" value="', $val, '" />';
}

array_walk( $hiddenVars, 'outputHiddenFields' );

The advantage of this method is that your array $hiddenVars could change dynamically and this would still work.

Answer 3

Well there is a smarter way. You can use just one hidden field and the value would be encoded serialized string of all of your variables :

$options = array(
'asd' => 1,
'zxc' => 2,
);
$options = base64_encode(serialize($options));
echo '<input type="hidden" name="state" value="' . $options . '" />';

Then you can get values like this:

$options = unserialize(base64_decode($_POST['state']));