Calling a PHP function in a dynamically created HTML table

Question

I have a HTML Table that is populated from a mySQL table as seen below:

$sql = "SELECT `ID`,`SaveName`, `CourseNumber`, `FormType`, `POSTString`, `DateModified` FROM `SavedFormsTable` WHERE 1";
$result = mysqli_query($con,$sql);

echo "<table border='1'>
<tr>
<th>Save File Name</th>
<th>Course Number</th>
<th>Date Modified</th>
<th>Load Old Form</th>
</tr>";

while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) {
  echo "<tr>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['SaveName'] . "</td>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['CourseNumber'] . "</td>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['DateModified'] . "</td>";
  echo '<td><button type="button" onclick="LoadFormJS('.$row['ID'].');">Load Form!</button>';
  echo "</tr>";
}    
echo "</table>";

My problem is on the 4th line from the bottom. in the HTML <button>

I am trying to create a button IN THE HTML TABLE that when clicked will call a PHP function. But i have to echo the HTML in order to create the table from the mySQL database.

Is there a clever way of to do this???

The PHP function I need to call:

function LoadFormPHP($ID){

$con=mysqli_connect("","User636626","EasyPassword","pansyc5_SavedForms");
// Check connection
if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
  echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
}
$sql = sprintf("SELECT `POSTString` FROM `SavedFormsTable` WHERE `ID`=%d",$ID);
$result = mysqli_query($con,$sql);
$row = mysqli_fetch_array($result);
//mysql_close($con);
$_POST = unserialize(base64_decode($row["POSTString"]));

}

The JS function i tried (and failed) to call the PHP function from:

<script>
         function LoadFormJS(ID){
        alert(ID);
        <?php LoadFormPHP(ID) ?>
         }
      </script>

Answer 1

You just have some syntax issues -

echo '<td><button type="button" onclick="LoadForm(' .$row['ID'] .')">Load Form!</button>';

What you could do to call the PHP function is to surround your button with a form using a hidden input to hold the value of $row['ID']. Clicking on the button would load the proper form at that point and you could ditch the inline JS in favor of a form action.

Answer 2

You cannot mix html (client side) and php (server side) together. For this kind of cases AJAX is a good tool. The onclick can contain a request to a javascript function that fires the request back to your server, and returns the desired HTML.