Posted by qazwart on 07/11/07 16:55

I am new to PHP, but have been a Perl programmer for over a couple of
decades. My question isn't necessarily a particular programming
question, but has to do with passing variables between PHP programs:

I have a file that contains two fields on each line: The build number
tag and the QA Release tag. I display a form and give users a chance
to do one of three things:

1. Generate release notes between any two QA releases.
2. Generate new release notes for the next QA release.
3. Generate release notes for a previous release.

The source files are stored in CVS and I am using the "cvs rlog"
command to build the release notes which consists of all the files
that have been modified, deleted or added and the check in comments.
The user selects the QA releases via a drop down fields in the form.
In order to just get the files that have been changed, I need a "From"
release and a "To" release.

For item #1, this is pretty simple because the user gives me the
"From" and "To" release. For item #2, I store the information I need
in hidden fields. Item #3 is the tricky one. The user is selecting
only a single release (the "To" release), and I have to figure out the
previous release in order to generate the release notes. I know the
name of the file, and could easily parse the file to find this
information, but I already did this once in order to build the drop
down fields.

What I would really like to do is pass the whole PHP variable array
from one PHP program to another between http calls much like the _POST
array does. I see several ways of doing this:

* Use a SQL database. This seems like a bit of overkill for just this
one item.
* Use hidden fields: There could be dozens, if not hundreds of
releases to choose from. That's a lot of data to pack into a form.
* Use cookies: I know I can pass single pieces of data to cookies, but
a whole array?

So, exactly how do you pass a lot of information from one PHP program
to another between http calls? Global variables don't work in this
case because the variables lose their information between http calls.

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