can I use a php method in a form action?

Question

Hi All,

Is it possible to send form data to a PHP class' method rather than to a file? Or would I have to use AJAX to do this?

For instance, can I have something like:

<form action="my_obj::form_submit" method="post">...</form>
//rather than
<form action="my_obj.php" method="post">...</form>

I don't want anyone to be able to access the entire file directly. I don't see a problem having a single public static method that is available, though, because a single method is easy to "harden" for public use. There is an AJAX function to help me do this, but I think it would be faster to not do that.

Thanks

Answer 1

No, it's not possible as the client-side code can never know about that kind of server-side implementation detail. As Chuck Vose comments, if that were even possible, it's a major security liability.

action attributes on <form> elements, like <a href>, are simply URIs, so you cannot point to some specific part of a PHP code and expect PHP to assemble everything and run it. Again it's the same client/server side issue.

Unless you use some kind of URL routing like many frameworks provide (per webbiedave's answer), you won't be able to go any further than a URI pointing to a PHP script in your site.

Answer 2

I would try to handle it via a specific uri query. So you can check, whether a key in the $_GET variable is given and load the class with a specific method.

Otherwise knowing of a given key in the $_POST variable let you forward your process to the method you want to call. So there is no specific need for this kind of form submit call.

Answer 3

You can't do action="my_obj::form_submit" as that's not even a valid URI. However, you can do action="/my_obj/form_submit" and map the URI to /<object>/<method> This is the approach that many MVC frameworks use.