PHP and checkboxes with the same name

If you have worked with ColdFusion before you know that if have checkboxes in the form that have the same name they come into the form scope as a comma separated list. I tried to pull the same trick using PHP but only go the last checkbox's value. Confused I did a little a research and found out that if you put [] behind your name PHP interprets it as an array but keeps everything to the left of the [] as your name when comeing in through the $_REQUEST scope. See below.

<form name="the_form" method="post">

<input type="checkbox" name="boarder" value="Joe" >
<input type="checkbox" name="boarder" value="Jamie" >
<input type="checkbox" name="boarder" value="Jake" >

</form>

In ColdFusion when you submit this form you would get an variable in the form scope
called "boarder" with the values "Joe,Jamie,Jake" in a comma seperated list. In PHP you would get "Jake". To solve this I added [] to the checkbox name.

<form name="the_form" method="post">

<input type="checkbox" name="boarder[]" value="Joe" >
<input type="checkbox" name="boarder[]" value="Jamie" >
<input type="checkbox" name="boarder[]" value="Jake" >

</form>

Now in PHP you would get an variable in the $_REQUEST scope called "boarder" which is type array with first element "Joe, the second element "Jamie", and the third element "Jake". Notice the variable name is still "boarder" even though we specified "boarder[]".

I am not choosing sides on PHP or ColdFusion they are both cool, but I found it interesting that you can tell PHP what type this var is through the html form.

I found my answer at:
http://www.computing.net/answers/webdevel/php-amp-checkboxes/1122.html#postfp

PHP and singleton's

So I wanted to have use singletons in php, but couldn't find any good tuts that didn't involve cake or zend. I did quite a bit research and asking around and here is what I came up with. I framed the findings around Coldspring which is a ColdFusion dependency injection tool, which basically means it handles your objects for you.

First I have an xml file where I define where my objects (classes) are. If you are not familiar with MVC, I would first suggest reading up on it. But anyways, below I define some objects paths so I don't have to worry about where they are. As you can see I have an objects controller, service, and gateway.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<objects>

<object name="objectsController" type="controller" address="app/controllers/objectsController.php"/>
<object name="objectsService" type="service" address="app/services/objectsService.php"/>
<object name="objectsGateway" type="model" address="app/models/objects/objectsGateway.php"/>

</objects>

The next step is to read in the xml nodes. So below is a function that I feed a path to my xml file (above) and it returns me the nodes in PHP.

public function loadSimpleXML($xmlPath){
if (file_exists($xmlPath)) {
$xml = simplexml_load_file($xmlPath);
return $xml;
}else{
exit('Failed to open '.$xmlPath);
}
}

The next step I loop the nodes with the name "object" and do stuff with it.

//create singletons array to hold objects in
$singletons = array();

//get the count of the nodes
$cnt = count($xml->object);

//loop object nodes
for($i = 0; $i < $cnt; $i++) { $object = $xml->object[$i];

//get object name and address
$name = $this->getAttribute($object,"name");
$address = $this->getAttribute($object,"address");

//include the file
$this->loadClass($address);

//create an instances of the object
$pointer = (string)$name[0];
$singletons[$pointer] = new $pointer;

}

Alot of stuff happened in the above function so I will break it down by a few lines. First we get the node by doing:

$object = $xml->object[$i];

After we get the node I call a function to get the attributes of the node. In my case I just want the name and where the object file is at.

$name = $this->getAttribute($object,"name");
$address = $this->getAttribute($object,"address");

public function getAttribute($node,$name){
$attrs = $node->attributes();

return $attrs[$name];
}

Next I have to include the file. In PHP I found out you need to include the file if you want to use it. To do this I created a function that does a require_once(). I know you don't need a function for it but I figure it didn't hurt and this way if I have to do anything before my include or after I have the ability to do it now. In case you don't $this is used to call a function within a object file. Also you notice I have a variable call $GLOBALS["siteroot"]. I actually load up an environment xml file that takes of these properties but to be straight...the variable just contains the site root of my project, so no biggie here.

$this->loadClass($address);

public function loadClass($classPath){
require_once($GLOBALS["siteroot"].$classPath);
}

The next part was the hard part...dynamically creating an instance of the object. I found out that I needed to use a pointer to use "new", which took forever to figure out, because me and pointers don't mix (I just wanna chain stuff together). Anyways here's what I got.

//create an instances of the object
$pointer = (string)$name[0];

//append object to an array objects so they can be used later.
$singletons[$pointer] = new $pointer;

Later I store the $singleton's array in the $GLOBAL scope because it's the only scope that I know is some what persistant...but it's not. I don't think PHP has a persistant scope without creating a session. If any one has any ideas on where I can put this $singletons array so I don't to have read it from the xml everytime (if you caught the globals...I am techinically not fully using the singleton's pattern because I have no scope to put it in) I would greatly appreciate it, but I have found this works pretty slick for now.