using query strings on EE1 site

Question

I see from another question that it's possible to pass query strings through the URL in EE1 but the question itself and its answer didn't really answer how this is done or help solve my specific question which is, can I pass a query string through the URL and have it fill out a form in EE1? I know you can do this easily with PHP and for this case I'm OK with enabling PHP on this single template. However, my quick test didn't seem to work. I added the following php to the head of the template:

<?php
$first_name = $_GET['first_name'];
$last_name = $_GET['last_name'];
?>

and added the following value parameter to the appropriate input fields:

value="<?php echo $first_name; ?>"
value="<?php echo $last_name; ?>"

I've tried setting PHP to render on input and output and have tried an embedded template for the form as well as placing it in the template but the query string values aren't populating the form fields.

What am I missing here? Is it even possible to get query strings to populate a form in EE1?

Answer 1

Like @PonderTheWeb I don't see anything wrong with the code you've posted.

Can you confirm that you have PHP on in the template by doing a simple:

<? echo "hello world"; ?>

But much more importantly:

Don't trust user input!

It is not good security practice to simply pass forward your $_GET variables without sanitizing them first.

Fortunately EE makes this pretty easy for you.

// Load EE's Global Input Class
global $IN;

// Pass the EE Global inputs forward to the variable you want to use.
$first_name = $IN->GBL('first_name');
$last_name = $IN->GBL('last_name');