testing forms

We've been talking about input forms (html elements), and then php scripts to process a submitted form:

The URL that handles the submitted form is the one given in the form tag as the submit attribute:

  <!-- inside form.php (or, form.html) -->
  <form submit='submit.php' action="post">
    Login: <input type='text' name='userid' />
    <br />
    Remember me?: <input type='checkbox' name='remember' value='yep' />
    …
  </form>

Use the $_POST (or, $_GET) array to look up values; for indices (keys), use the name attribute that you gave the input-element back in the html.

  <!-- inside submit.php -->
  <?php
     echo "Hey there ", $_POST['userid'];
     if (array_has_index('remember',$_POST)) {
       echo "How could I ever forget?";
        // $_POST['remember'] = 'yep'
       }
  ?>

Note that checkboxes which weren't checked, etc., don't have any entries in $_POST (even though you might wish it had an entry with value “false” or something).
If you gave several input-elements the same name attribute, and the name ends in “[]”, then in $_POST look it up without the “[]”, and you'll get an array of all the values (with numeric indices/keys).
Use http post when the URL-request ;
Use http get when the URL-request .
php detail: When a php program contains anything not inside “<?php … >”, those lines are simply .

testing a form-handler

video: easily testing a form-handler (18m38s)

Our functions have test cases, and this helps gives us confidence before we ever deploy to the web. But what about form-handlers? The result from form-handler is a long page that includes various bits from the form. It's too tedious to make this a check/expect sort of test, since the details of the html part of the output aren't relevant (and might change). Moreover, generating the page requires the POST data, that were entered by hand back in the form. But we would like to be able to check that the form-handler without going through the web, and also eyeball-check the result on certain inputs w/o having to continually re-type the inputs and call up the form.

Solution: Make a php program which simply initializes $_POST, and then require's the form-handler. Recall the sample form from last lecture (and recall what happens when it submits). Then, inspect:

formB-handle-test-1_php.txt source; results.
formB-handle-test-2_php.txt source (alternate init syntax); results.
formB-handle-test-0_php.txt source (degenerate sample); results.
formB-handle-test-3_php.txt source; results.

Awesome sauce: We can run these handler-tests locally, or over the web. The former is useful when the latter isn't showing up as expected.

Although we use these to manually test our handler, they are not unit tests (they're not automated). Admittedly, the filename topic-handle-sample-input-N.php might be better a more descriptive name than just topic-handle-test-N.php, but we'll concede to a shorter, more convenient name.

video from distance lecture (breeze), 2017-feb-14 (1h23m), REVIEWING this info

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