Support for checkboxes in forms?

Support
1

openEMR 7.0.2(1), hosted on xampp in windows

Hi. I tried creating a custom form, containing checkboxes. I find that if I check a checkbox and save the form, all is fine. If I then edit the form and uncheck the checkbox and save, the checkbox remains checked, and the corresponding field in form’s table has still has the “checked” value

I found that save.php for my form is calling formUpdate, with parameter $_POST (and formUpdate lives in library\api.inc.php – took a while to find that). $_POST, as received by formUpdate, does not contain my checkbox field. Actually, in save.php for my form, $_POST also does not contain info for my unchecked checkboxes, so this is not an issue with formUpdate, but seems to be a general browser issue with form submission via POST, in that unchecked checkboxes are ignored by the submit.
Am I understanding this right?
Any kludge to get a checkbox to send some value when unchecked, so something will get written to the database for an unchecked checkbox?
I guess I could have a hidden field in my form that is valued for both checked and unchecked state of the checkbox, and pass that in form submission. Seems a rather painful approach
Thanks for any better ideas
– Hank

2

I guess this is a well known issue in the html standard

Always interesting the things I stumble upon, after so many years

The kludge, of adding a hidden element prior to the checkbox element, with both having the same “name” value, works great. True for php since php takes the last element of those with the same name, when doing a Post/Submit. Not necessarily true for other languages.