How can I store PHP values when building html tables?
<p>I don't think I asked the question very well, so let me elaborate what I'm doing. </p>

<p>I'm building a simple website for a project my niece is working on.  She wants to implement a ticket ordering system for their class graduation (this is all just for the project, it won't actually be used for anything in a production setting).  She wanted a "map" of seats available and a way to distinguish seats that have been sold and seats that are open.</p>

<p>My vision for implementing this is creating three tables, one for each section.  I'm using PHP to build the sections, and at the moment they contain an image that indicates if the seat is taken or not that is wrapped in an anchor tag that points to the same page with the url:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;a href='index.php?section=$section&amp;row=$i&amp;seat=$j' class='order'&gt;&lt;img src='open.png'&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>So my grand plan was, when they click on the image for a particular seat to have a modal dialog pop up that does one of two things.</p>

<p>If the seat is already taken, it will simply display the buyer's information.  If the seat is not taken, it will contain a form that will allow the user to input their information and submit it, which will then write to a MySQL database table that stores this data.</p>

<p>I was using the jQuery UI dialog for modal forms (<a href="http://jqueryui.com/dialog/#modal-form" rel="nofollow">http://jqueryui.com/dialog/#modal-form</a>) to accomplish the modal dialog before I tried adding the index.php?section= etc to the anchors, and now that I've added that part it flashes up the dialog but then the page refreshes and the dialog disappears.  </p>

<p>My question is, is there a way to store the section/row/seat information in the anchor in such a way so as not to refresh the page when it's clicked on?  Could I add some code before the HTML tag on index.php to handle when the anchor has been clicked?  The last time I worked with PHP was several years ago and I'm very rusty and not certain how to tackle this problem.</p>
