What are some best practices for maintaining user-selected values in select boxes across multiple pages in PHP applications?

When users select values in select boxes on one page of a PHP application, it is common for them to expect those selections to persist across multiple pages. To achieve this, you can use sessions to store the selected values and then populate the select boxes with those values on subsequent pages.

// Start session
session_start();

// Check if a value has been selected
if(isset($_POST[&#039;select_box&#039;])){
    $_SESSION[&#039;selected_value&#039;] = $_POST[&#039;select_box&#039;];
}

// Populate select box with previously selected value
$selected_value = isset($_SESSION[&#039;selected_value&#039;]) ? $_SESSION[&#039;selected_value&#039;] : &#039;&#039;;

echo &#039;&lt;select name=&quot;select_box&quot;&gt;&#039;;
echo &#039;&lt;option value=&quot;option1&quot; &#039;.($selected_value == &#039;option1&#039; ? &#039;selected&#039; : &#039;&#039;).&#039;&gt;Option 1&lt;/option&gt;&#039;;
echo &#039;&lt;option value=&quot;option2&quot; &#039;.($selected_value == &#039;option2&#039; ? &#039;selected&#039; : &#039;&#039;).&#039;&gt;Option 2&lt;/option&gt;&#039;;
echo &#039;&lt;option value=&quot;option3&quot; &#039;.($selected_value == &#039;option3&#039; ? &#039;selected&#039; : &#039;&#039;).&#039;&gt;Option 3&lt;/option&gt;&#039;;
echo &#039;&lt;/select&gt;&#039;;

Keywords

PHP session variables form submission $_POST $_SESSION

What are some best practices for maintaining user-selected values in select boxes across multiple pages in PHP applications?

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