Paginating a long list of checkboxes in Magento

it would be awesome if someone could help me with this - I've already spent more than a day on it. :(

In a phtml file in Magento, I'm displaying a long list of products with a checkbox next to each. I've already added some code to paginate this list. The problem is, when I move to say page 2, I need开发者_开发技巧 to 'remember' which boxes were selected in page 1, and select them when I move back to page 1. I know how to use javascript to detect if a checkbox is checked or not. I was planning to save an array of selected boxes in the magento session - adding to it when more boxes are checked and deleting when boxes are unchecked. But my session-changing code is PHP, and my checkbox-detector is javascript. I know I can't call my session-changing function from javascript - I've been told that I would need AJAX to do this. I don't know any AJAX at all. Is there any other way to do this?

I'd be happy to post relevant snippets of my code if anyone can help me. Thanks!

UPDATE: Okay, so I decided to use AJAX after all, and I've added a lot of AJAX code already. The problem is, it's not working. Btw, I'm not using jQuery. When I write this in Magento:

xmlhttp.open("POST", 'adjust_session.php', true); xmlhttp.send(params);

exactly where do I need to put my adjust_session.php file? It's not working if I put it in the same folder as my phtml file (where I'm calling the open function).

Thanks!

How are you actually doing the pagination? If you have to make a round-trip to the server for the paginated data anyway, send a list of checked/unchecked with it and toggle in the session. Then, when rendering the new page, either check the boxes in the HTML directly, or just pass a list of currently checked boxes in as JS and parse it on the response.

Alternatively, if you are doing everything on one page (and using AJAX for pagination already), you could also hold onto an array in JS and recheck the boxes after you render them.

Hope that helps!

Thanks, Joe