I thought it was a bad practice to have 1500 variables?

But... I don't think you will have 1500 variables. At most you will have a single (hash) variable holding all the relevant data. OTOH I suppose you may use JavaScript on the client side to preprocess the data into some condensed stuff to send. That may viable if you know JS. With AJAX you may even transmit the entries one at a time, but I suppose that would mean lots of interactions with the database and I'm not sure that's what you want...