Help to send jQuery cloned inputs to the database

Question

I have a form that will add links from download servers to a file, however each file may contain n links from download servers

In HTML:

<input type="text" name="server_down">

This input is cloned by a jQuery so that the user can add other server options if the file has more than one distribution server, so I did something like this:

<input type="text" name="server_down_1">
<input type="text" name="server_down_2">
<input type="text" name="server_down_n">

Whenever the user clones the input, the last value adds up to 1. However, to send to the database I need to make a loop based on the amount of elements I cloned, and for this I made an auxiliary input as follows

<input type="hidden" name="field_clonada" value="Quantas vezes foi clonada">

This way I can save in the database without problem, but what I would like to know is if there are more "efficient" ways to do this, or what are the other ways to do it?

The PHP Loop I use to process the data is this:

<?php $count = $_POST['field_clonada'];
for ($i=1; $i <= $count; $i++) {
   salva_no_bd($arq_id, 'server_down_'.$i, $_POST['server_down_'.$i]);
}

Answer 1

Instead of listing the name, which is more complicated, you can use the name as an array adding square brackets:

name="server_down[]"

The values will be sent to PHP in array form, where you can make a foreach to take the values:

$server_down = $_POST['server_down'];
foreach($server_down as $key => $i){
   salva_no_bd($arq_id, 'server_down_'.$key, $i);
}

The $i is the value of each field in the array. The $key returns the index of the items in the array, starting from 0.

See if that’s what it was, because I didn’t quite understand the 'server_down_'.$count, where you concatenate the amount of the items. If that’s what you want, change to:

$server_down = $_POST['server_down'];
$count = sizeof($server_down);
foreach($server_down as $key => $i){
   salva_no_bd($arq_id, 'server_down_'.$count, $i);
}

The sizeof($server_down) returns the number of elements in the array.