PHP - remove parameters from URL but still pass to another page

Question

I have a php website. The first page contains a list of products and I'm currently passing the ID (picked up from mysql database) for the product within the URL to the items page i.e. localhost/item.php?4

I don't want to show any parameters in the URL so have investigated another option which is using a session.

The issue with this is that the link to each of my items is in a while loop retrieving ID and product name from the database so I'm having issues making the session mirror the ID when an item/link has been clicked.

Here's a snippet of my code (I've removed the session code):

$stmt = $con->prepare("SELECT pid, product_name FROM persons where deleted = ? order by order_age desc");
$stmt->bind_param("i", $del);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->get_result();

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
// output data of each row
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {

    echo '<tr><td>';
        $phn = $row["pid"];
        echo "<span><a class='storage' href='item.php'>" . $rows["product_name"] . "</a></span>";
}
echo "</td></tr>";
}

I guess I have two questions:

1. Is it possible to achieve what I need to do
2. What is the correct way of achieving this

Thanks in advance, Pete

Answer 1

Options, briefly

• You could first load /item.php?id=4 then redirect to /item-hidden.php & use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] & parse_url & process the GET portion of the referrer url.

• You could also use session for this. Set the session variables when the page loads to the long-url, then redirect to the short url, load the session & clear the session.

• If you just want to shorten the url, then you could use uniqid() And put the unique id in the url & save the paramaters to a session variable with that unique id.

• You could use a pre-made url shortener.

• You could roll your own url shortener using a reference file that holds an array or a database.

• There are surely other creative solutions that I haven't thought of

My thoughts:

• Hiding the url altogether will make for a poor user experience - inability to bookmark, using the back-button will be funky, hard to share an item on social media or a blog
• Shortening the url is nice but not necessary
• Depending on the options you're working with, you might be able to create shorthands that are more friendly to look at in the url bar or db-references for sets of options that are extremely common
• What you're trying to do seems like a great learning project - learn about sessions, http_referer, databasing & whatnot. I think by doing what you're wanting, you'll learn that you don't really like how it feels - or you might come up with a clever way to make your URLs prettier & make the UX really nice.