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Imagine you're building a PHP web application, and you need to display different forms on different pages. Now, for most of us, we'd likely be using some framework to solve this problem, but even if we weren't, the obvious solution of "use a different PHP file for each screen" is a fairly obvious solution.
Dare I say, too obvious a solution?
What if we could have one page handle requests for many different URLs? Think of the convenience of having ONE file to run your entire application? Think of the ifs.
if( substr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], strrpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "=" ) + 1 ) == "request" )
{
echo "<form name=\"request\" action=\"\" method=\"post\" enctype=\"multipart/form-data\" onsubmit=\"return validrequest();\">\n";
}
else if( substr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], strrpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "=" ) + 1 ) == "response" )
{
echo "<form action=\"\" method=\"post\" onsubmit=\"return validresponse()\">\n";
}
else if( substr( substr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "=" ) + 1 ), 0, 7 ) == "respond" )
{
echo "<form name=\"respond\" action=\"\" method=\"post\" enctype=\"multipart/form-data\" onsubmit=\"return validresponse();\">\n";
}
else if( substr( substr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "=" ) + 1 ), 0, 6 ) == "upload" )
{
echo "<form name=\"upload\" method=\"post\" action=\"\" enctype=\"multipart/form-data\">\n";
}
else if( substr( substr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "=" ) + 1 ), 0, 8 ) == "showitem" )
{
echo "<form name=\"showitem\" action=\"\" method=\"post\" enctype=\"multipart/form-data\">\n";
}
else if( substr( substr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "=" ) + 1 ), 0, 7 ) == "adduser" )
{
echo "<form name=\"adduser\" action=\"\" method=\"post\" onsubmit=\"return validadduser();\">\n";
}
else if( substr( substr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "=" ) + 1 ), 0, 8 ) == "edituser" )
{
echo "<form name=\"adduser\" action=\"\" method=\"post\" onsubmit=\"return validedituser();\">\n";
}
else
{
echo "<form action=\"\" method=\"post\">\n";
}
Someone reinvented routing, badly. We split the requested URL on an =, so that we can compare the tail of the string against one of our defined routes. Oops, no, we don't split, we take a substring, which means we couldn't have a route upload_image or showitems, since they'd collide with upload and showitem.
And yes, you can safely assume that there are a bunch more ifs that control which specific form fields get output.
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