how to pick value of a textbox in a php variable

How are the values being submitted to the server? is it AJAX, form submission (and POST or GET)?

The first thing to do is some simple de-bugging. I’d add this in just below where you’re setting the value:

echo "";
var_export ($_POST);
echo "";
die ();

That will show you every $_POST variable that was given, and will stop any further processing. That will at least show you what you have to work with. From there you can work backwards if the value isn’t being sent.

And just as a note, the main times that I’ve seen this in my own cod,e it’s been from me getting the name of the textbox wrong, so I was trying to get a wrong value. As an example…

<input type="text" name="my_input_area" value="My Value" />

And PHP with the wrong reference:

$my_value = $_POST ['my_imput_area'];

It took me about 30 minutes to figure out that my spelling was wrong.

You need to actually send the value back to your PHP script, and you’re not doing that. You are only populating the textbox, but that’s where it stops.

There’s two ways of sending the value. First, through a standard form that, and that’s the easiest way to do it. secondly, you can do it through a jQuery post using AJAX.

I’d suggest using AJAX. It’s a bit harder to do, but it does tend ot work a lot better, and will most likely give a better experience to your visitors.

You’re still not actually sending the value back to the server. You need to do that before you can save anything. go back and re-read what I posted above as it’s got all of the information that you need. 🙂

There’s examples on the page that I linked to. That shows how it works, and what you need to do…

JavaScript code:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {

var data = {
	'action': 'my_action',
	'whatever': 1234
};

// since 2.8 ajaxurl is always defined in the admin header and points to admin-ajax.php
jQuery.post(ajaxurl, data, function(response) {
	alert('Got this from the server: ' + response);
});
});

PHP code:

add_action( 'wp_ajax_my_action', 'my_action_callback' );

function my_action_callback() {
	global $wpdb; // this is how you get access to the database

	$whatever = intval( $_POST['whatever'] );

	$whatever += 10;

        echo $whatever;

	wp_die(); // this is required to terminate immediately and return a proper response
}

That will give you a working solution. Of course you will need to substitute yoru own values in there, so keep on reading that page, and look at the jQuery post() function page and you’ll figure it out.

Sorry but no. That’s not AJAX.

All you are doing is setting the value on the page. You are not sending the value back to the server.

Look at the examples that I’ve given with jQuery.post(). That’s where JAAX comes into it, and that is what you will need to do to send the value back to the server.