Re: Can Plucker Handle Forms

[Bill Nalen/Towers Perrin]

Ben, I'm really interested in being able to use forms too.  Can you keep us
in the loop so I can make sure my Windows conduit can pull the changed
records back off the Palm at sync time and then add the url+post info to
the spider list?  Do you intend to create a new database record for the
post info?  Will this be a new database record type?

Thanks



                                                                                       
                 
                                                                                       
                 
                                         To:     Plucker Development List              
                 
                    Ben Chess            <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>               
                 
                    <[EMAIL PROTECTED]        cc:     (bcc: Bill Nalen/Towers Perrin)       
                 
                    m>                   Subject:     Re: Can Plucker Handle Forms     
                 
                                                                                       
                 
                    06/07/2001                                                         
                 
                    12:56 AM                                                           
                 
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On Thursday, June 7, 2001, at 12:46  AM, David A. Desrosiers wrote:
>
>          It's been asked by dozens of people over the past couple of
years.
> There is one person actively working on it (Ben Chess), and it will
> require
> some "interesting" changes in the way the conduit and parsers work
> (i.e. you
> have to pull the form values from the Palm database, reverse-engineer
> that
> back into a URL (what if you used --no-urlinfo?) and then POST to the
> original
> website you retrieved them from wait for a response, get response, then
> create
> a (COMPLETELY NEW) database with the form response page, and sync that
> to the
> device. Not as easy as it seems, but definately doable. It will take a
> few
> changes to the way we build and store PDBs for Plucker, but it's
> possible.

The last part of this, turning the POST response page back into a
Plucker database becomes logistically very bizarre.  What if the user
wants to fill out the form again?  What if the form data changes with
each post? Personally, the AvantGo way makes sense to me.  Fill out the
form, warn the user the post won't be made until next sync, then go on
with life.  It makes feedback forms useful. Not many other uses for
forms  make sense for offline web viewing.  Other ideas are welcome...

Ben