Controlling PHP Output

Hi Ray,

There's no code yet.  I'm still walking through the whole thing in my mind.

Regarding jQuery resources, on my bookshelf I have:
   Learning jQuery 1.3 - Swedberg
    jQuery Cookbook - Various Experts
    jQuery in Action - Bibeault & Katz
    Head First jQuery - Benedetti
    jQuery Enlightmenment - Lindley
    Pro jQuery - Freeman

But my question doesn't seem to be about jQuery.  The question is how to make PHP construct just a piece of the page - the slide show div - and return that innereHTML in an Ajax response, without causing anything to display on the client's browser.  What does that PHP script look like?  I'll have no problem getting jQuery on the client page to put that innerHTML in the right place.

Steve

Dave,

This is also going to be more than one page or file of code.  You need the initial file that displays the main page.  You need a PHP page that responds to the AJAX requests and you need another page that records the user settings in the database.

Agreed.  The question now is what will the PHP script look like that responds to the Ajax request that is passing up the new slide show parameters.  How do I get that script to build the new slide show div and respond to the Ajax request with  the new innerHTML, without displaying anything on the client's browser?

Steve

Or maybe the best solution is to build the div with jQuery at the client, rather than bothering PHP, and then upload the new div innerHTML to the server later, to keep it in the loop.  Maybe this is what Ray was suggesting, but I missed it.

... return that innereHTML in an Ajax response, without causing anything to display...

Why would you want to return something that causes nothing to display?  I am not getting this concept yet, I think.

It will display when the jQuery in the client sticks the Ajax response into the DOM.  I just wanted to avoid doing something in PHP that caused the whole page to go down and get displayed, since that's what normally happens when you request a php page.  That is, you request a php page, php runs, and bang! -  the whole thing in your browser.  But I'm not issuing a browser request for a php page here, so maybe I'm worrying about nothing.

Plus, as I suggested in my last post, the better solution is probably to have jQuery process the new slide show parameters at the client and put the results directly into the div, instead of getting involved with the server at this point.

Thanks.  I probably wasn't very clear about what I was trying to do, but in my own mind I'm past the block I had, and I credit the dialog here for getting me past that.  Sometimes you just need to talk to someone.

Thanks

Sounds like you're on the right track.  Usually jQuery can be used to just reload a part of the browser viewport, not the whole web page.

I too only wanted to load a part, but that part was the entire innerHTML of a div and I didn't know how to do that without triggering a download of the whole page.  Since I started this post I've decided I probably don't need to  have the server send me a div's html, but if I do return to that approach I discovered phpquery, that I'd never heard of before yesterday.  It apparently will build a DOM on the server for a page and pull out any part of it you want -  just what I was looking for.

Anyway, thanks for your interest.
Steve