Hello to everyone.

I’m reading the book: “Beginning PHP 4” by ****yu Choi, Allan Kent, Chris Lea, Ganesh Prasad, Chris Ullman, Jon Blank and Sean Cazzell first published in 2000 by Wrox. Although it might sound odd, reading a five years old book for PHP 4, when PHP 5 is already ageing, I’ll just answer that I had no time to read the book when I wanted to. Anyway, I’m traversing its contents and so far all go well and have reached chapter 7, at the regular expressions but, my problem has nothing to do with them.

I like to expand and try what I’ve learned in every chapter by making programs of my own. So far I’ve managed to create dynamic forms, and then showing their contents. This time I tried to do the following:

Take a number of employees and options as: "current tax rate", "welfare insurance rate" and if the company applies benefits for employees, like: if they are "$underage" or have "$underage kids", or are "$married" and if it is a "holiday" like Christmas etc.. If the company allows those benefits and the user checks the check box then he must also provide the present added on the primary salary value. When the user has added this data which on most cases are taken by droplists to minimize potential wrong data entries, we move to the second page.

Here we create a dynamic form for the number of employees supplied by the user on the previous page. Each line contains the following:

• Increasing number (just a visual key/index)
• A text filed to enter the employee’s name
• A drop list to select the employee’s age.
• Two radio buttons to select the employee’s gender
• A check box to check if $Married = True (shown only if selected so in the first page)
• A check box to check if $Parent = True (shown only if selected so in the first page)
• A check box to which is selected and disabled (shown only if selected so in the first page)

Suppose we have entered the data for 10 employees and only 5 of them [u]are married</u> and those are selected in random order. When me click to go on the third and final page we pass the optional variables selected on the first page via hidden form elements, the rest of the data though is being tranfered via arrays like: etc.

The big problem now is that as most of you have already assumed... That [u]the index keys of those arrays do NOT correspond which each others</u>. If, lets say, only the last 5 of the 10 employees were married and then we try to show the out coming data on a form (and of course, make the appropriate calculations for the salary depended on the $Married, $Parent etc. options) we’ll see that the first 5 employee’s will be shown as married and NOT the last 5 which would be the correct, altering also the out coming calculations.

So what I like to know is if you people know anyway to solve this problem, and if this can’t be done, what solutions you have come with to surpass this obstacle? I’ve been thiking of this problem the last few days but didn’t came up with any solution for it, probably cause of lack of experience and lack of further, advanced php use.

Any help would be welcomed. :)

The code so far of the three pages is listed below (and if copy-pasted on your notepad and saved as my_Employees(1 or 2 or 3).php they will be fully functional to help you understand what I'm trying to do (sorry if it looks too amateur and crappy).

- Pericles


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