HTML form with dropdown forms, sending it to database - html

Question

I'm tying to make a html form with a dropbox where you can choose a few options. However when I want to send this to the databse, something goes wrong. Namely that it doesn't send the variable in the name but uses the option as variable.
<select name="name">
<option value="op1">op1</option>
<option value="op2">op2</option>
<option value="op3">op3</option>
<option value="op4">op4</option>
</select>
So when submitting this, it doesn't send var name with value opX but just opX.
While in a normal form box this seems to work:
<input name="email" type="text" value="" size="79"><br>
This sends var email with value = stuff that I typed in.
I am accessing with:
$name = $_POST["name"];
How do I fix this?

Answer 1

You'll probably be accessing your HTML form from some server-side language like PHP or Java.
Here's a PHP example:
$varName = $_POST['name']; // Would equal op1, op2, op3 or op4

Answer 2

create a hidden type and add it under the </select> but within the same form.like <input type=""hidden" name"submit" value="submit">....then check whether its set or not..like in php
if(isset($_GET/POST[submit])
{
//access your form data here..like:
$x=$_GET/POST[name]
}
this is how you can be assured about whether data is set or not

Answer 3

If you want to save data coming from html form, you must use server-side language. ASP,ASP.NET,PHP etc. are server-side programming language.
If you will use PHP or ASP, you should use MySql as a database. If you will use ASP.NET ,you should use MSSQL as a database. If you will use ASP , you should use MS Access Database.
Example for ASP:
<%
variable = Request.Form("name")
variable2 = Request.Form("email")
Set conn=CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
dbpath="Data Source=" & Server.MapPath("db\yourdb.mdb")& ";Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;"
Conn.Open dbpath
sql = "INSERT INTO yourtable_name (your_field1,yur_field2) VALUES (' "&variable&" ',' "&variable2&" ')"
Conn.execute sql
%>