Posted by ZeldorBlat on 07/11/07 17:19

On Jul 11, 12:55 pm, qazwart <qazw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Use sessions:

<http://www.php.net/session>

On page 1:

<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION['foo'] = 'bar';
?>

On page 2:

<?php
session_start();
echo $_SESSION['foo'];
?>

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