PHP Single page submission fails with no error

Question

php single submission fails and page remains the same, data is not added to the database as well. When i click the cancel button, am redirected to a new form as it should work.

How do i get the submission to work and add the form data to the database? Below is the php and form html code and attached is the form picture

<div class="form-group">
                <label for="s_fname">First name</label> *
                <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="First name"> 
                <label for="s_lname">Last name</label> *
                <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="Last name"> 
                <label for="s_mname">Middle name</label>
                <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="Middle name">
                <label for="s_dob">Date of Birth</label> *
                <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="DD/MM/YYYY"> 
                <label for="g_phone">Phone Number</label> *
                <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="Phone number"> 
                <label for="g_email">Email</label> *
                <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="Email address"> 
                <label for="entry_year">Entry level</label> *
                <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="Entry level"> 
            </div>

            <div class="row text-right">
                <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Save" class="btn btn-default" /> 
                &nbsp 
                <button type="button" class="btn btn-default" aria-label="Left Align"><a href="new_student.php">Cancel</a></button>
            </div>

<?php 
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
    # process the form

    $s_fname = $_POST["s_fname"];
    $s_lname = $_POST["s_lname"];
    $s_mname = $_POST["s_mname"];
    $s_dob = $_POST["s_dob"];
    $g_phone = $_POST["g_phone"];
    $g_email = $_POST["g_email"];
    $entry_year = $_POST["entry_year"];

    $query  = "insert into students (s_fname, s_lname, s_mname, s_dob, g_phone, g_email, entry_year) ";
    $query .= "values ('{$s_fname}', '{$s_lname}', '{$s_mname}', {$s_dob}, {$g_phone}, {$g_email}, {$entry_year})";

    $result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

    if ($result) {
        # successful
        redirect_to("student.php");
    } else {
        # failure
        redirect_to("new_student.php");
    }
}
?>

Answer 1

1. Add names to your elements.
2. Make sure the form method is "post" not "get".

Answer 2

Mena -

I see a few problems with this code:

1. You do not have this HTML in a element. You will want to wrap that entire in a element and ensure that it is submitted as POST instead of GET. See the W3C documentation on forms here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp

2. As Don't Panic mentions, your form input fields do not have names, and therefore won't be submitted with the form. See the link above about the name attribute for input fields.

3. Unless you emitted it for security reasons (if you did, good call!), you will need a valid mysqli connection. See the PHP manual for instructions on how to create a connection: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysqli-connect.php

4. Lastly, your php code to redirect back to the student.php or new_student.php pages will not work unless you specifically created those functions somewhere else as they are not build into PHP. See the PHP manual for the header function here to correctly redirect your users: http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php

Otherwise, everything else looks like it should work!

Answer 3

The problem seems to lie in your HTML. The inputs in the form are not named. And further, if that's the whole code, then some very crucial part is amiss. You did not enclose the form controls in the <form> tag. You need to do this and define the form action as SELF shown. Your code should therefore look like below:

<form name="myform" method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">
<!--
   Your other form elements go here as in
   <input name="some name" class="some class" type="text" />
-->
</form>

That should work if its the php code that wasn't being reached by the form submission.