saving answers in an online test and sending them to database - mysql

Question

I'm asked to write an online test. I have 2 tables, one includes questions (2 fields, one for id and one for question text). And another table for saving answers (with 3 fields, one for id, one for question id and one for the answer).
Here's how I've written it so far:
<form name="test" method="post" action="index.html">
<div class="slideshowContainer">
$question_query=dbquery("SELECT * FROM questions");
while($question_array=dbarray($question_query)){
echo'
<div class="question">
'.$question_array['question_text'].'
<br />
<textarea name="'.$question_array['id'].'"></textarea>
</div>
';
}
echo'
<input id="finish" type="submit" name="finish_test" value="send" />
</div>
</form>';
I'm also using cycle plugin so users can see the questions as slides and write the answers in each textarea provided for each specific question.
What I can't do is the way I should write the if(isset($_POST['finish_test'])) part. Because as I know in this way, the received data is in the form of an array. So I thought I might need another for or while element when I'm gonna save the answers and send them to my database.
What can you suggest?

Answer 1

Sure you are gonna need to loop through the results of the $_POST but its nice to make different id for each of the text areas in your code. That way you can identify which are which answers. So to do that I would do something like this.
while($question_array=dbarray($question_query)){
i = 0;
echo'
<div class="question".i>
'.$question_array['question_text'].'
<br />
<input id='question' type='hidden' value="'.$question_array['id'].'"/>
<textarea name="answer".i></textarea>
</div>';
i++;
}
Now since I know that i starts with 0 and ends when the questions end I can loop through that and access $_POST['answer'.i] and make the insertion.
while ($_POST['answer'.$i]) {
$i = 0;
//insert query after establishing connection, which i believe you got figured out
$sql = 'INSERT INTO ANSWERS VALUES ($_POST['answer'.$i], $_POST['question'.$i])';//Note you must have the question id in some hidden input field
$result = mysql_query( $sql, $conn );//where $conn is your connection object
//after this you might want to do something with the $result,
$i++;
}