Just wanted to write and say thanks to Trevor, Ben, and Jim. Using the
web form is working great. I just needed a little push in the right
direction, and I got it here. So thanks for the suggestions.
Chris
On Sep 5, 2008, at 3:28 AM, Ben Rubinstein wrote:
Chris Sheffield wrote:
So my main question is, can Rev send data to a web form like this
in such a way that whatever fields we specify will be populated
when the browser/form opens? Not sure if something like this is
even possible. I haven't done enough web development to know. Is
some special JavaScript required to accomplish this? In thinking
this through a little more, if we have a web form that's already
set up to send an email, can't I take advantage of that in Rev by
creating my own form and then sending the data straight to the cgi
behind the form? Once again, I haven't done much web dev, so I may
not even know what I'm talking about. :-)
If anyone can help or can offer any other suggestions for how to
accomplish something similar, it'd be much appreciated.
If I've understood your request correctly, you really want a Rev
stack to
collect some information from the user, and have it arrive at your
server in
the form of an email. There's a simple way to get what you want, I
think.
Using the SMTP libraries should make this possible, but has some
issues, in
particular your rev stack then needs to know the address of a mail
server it
can use from within the user's network to send email. But if you
have a web
form on your server that's successfully sending email where you want
it,
there's no need to open a user's browser to view it. Instead, Rev can
effectively be that web form.
(Apologies if what follows is teaching my granny to suck eggs.) If
you look at
the source of the web page, it will contain a "form" element with an
action
and a method. The action is the address of a server-side resource
(a script
etc) which receives the values entered into the form and processes
it, in this
case by sending an email. The method is either POST or GET. If
it's GET,
then the resource expects the values in the URL string, eg if I fill
in this
simple form
<form method="GET" action="formmail.cgi">
<input name="first" type="text">
<input name="last" type="text">
<input type="submit" />
</form>
my browser will next fetch a URL like this:
...../formmail.cgi?first=Ben&last=Rubinstein
(the first part of the URL being constructed based on the URL of the
page
holding the form, adjusted by the 'action' of the form.)
Lecture over; the point is that executing
put "...../formmail.cgi?first=Ben&last=Rubinstein" into tURL
get URL tURL
or perhaps more likely
put "...../formmail.cgi" into tScriptURL
put tScriptURL \
& "?first=" & tFirstName \
& "&last=" & tLastName \
into tURL
get URL tURL
in your Rev stack will have exactly* the same effect on the
'formmail.cgi'
resource as the user entering those details into their browser. At
this point
Rev is acting like a browser, making a request of the web server.
So no need
to open an actual browser.
If the form uses the POST method instead, then it's only slightly more
complicated. Instead of get URL, you need to use the "post"
command, which
will look something more like this:
put libURLformData("first", tFirstName, "last", tLastName) into tData
post tData to tScriptURL
There will be a few complications along the way; you should read the
(splending new in 3.0) docs, check out functions like URLencode, and
above
all, test. But either way, given that you have the web form
already, this is
probably the simplest route to achieve what you want.
HTH,
- Ben
*pedants please leave now
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Chris Sheffield
Read Naturally, Inc.
www.readnaturally.com
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