Re: Posting to a Web Form and Displaying the Result in Normal Browser

rkc <rkc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:4618e0ff$0$5245$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

David W. Fenton wrote:
rkc <rkc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:4616f4a2$0$27057$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

David W. Fenton wrote:

Why do you want to display the data in a web browser?

Because I want to have them confirm the add/update, and have the
opportunity to edit if they need, and to preview how it will look
on the web page.

Is your plan to add items to a database on a web server using an
Access front end and then view how those items are displayed
when requested from the site?

That's part of it. What is happening is transferring items from
the Access inventory database to the online database that drives
the website. If it were a 1:1 transfer, it would be easy, but
everything has to be extensively processed for the website (it's
very complex). If it were 1:1, I wouldn't be worrying about
displaying a confirm.

In my case I figured if the data was correct in the resulting html
then it should display just fine.

Sorry, but I don't understand. It's the data that's the issue, and
it gets reformatted for upload. Right now, that's a batch process,
and it's too hard to do, such that they don't do it very often. I'm
implementing an record-by-record upload (along with a batch upload)
that is automated from the Access application. The need to display
it comes from the fact that only when they see it as it will come
out are they able to evaluate whether they've gotten the data right.

I *could* do it client-side, but as I replied to Gord, that would
require installing Apache and PHP on the two workstations this is
going to run from. I'm not about to do that!

I was processing vendor information from Excel files, cross
referencing it with markup information, specific customer pricing
information, and discount information from a Jet database and
writing it to another Jet database which was then transfered to a
MySQL database online. Not my setup. I was just massaging the data
into the desired format. I suppose so the .php application didn't
have to.

The confirmation form was then displaying information from the 2nd
Jet database side by side with what was returned by the website.
There was no real need to view what was actually rendered by a
browser.

Well, in my case, seeing the final output makes a huge difference.

What I'm going to do is simply use a flag field that already exists
(a TINYINT field) so that the record will be sent as is and appended
to the website database. Then I can easily use FollowHyperlink to
display a PHP page that will return in the browser the editable new
record and the final output.

My original approach was to render the editable data and the final
output without an append to the database, by sending parameters to
the PHP script and having it fill out the form and display the final
results. As that isn't practical, I'll have to do it with appending
*first*. There's one major advantage to that, and I hadn't thought
of it -- I can use the same PHP script for editing any existing
record.

It also occurs to me that the client could then also upload groups
of records and preview their final output, which is something that
we've needed on many an occasion (we use Word merges to preview the
data, but then they can't understand why it looks different on the
website; *sigh* -- this would make it possible to use the actual
website output instead of the Word merge files).

So, in the end, I guess it's an advantage that I can't do it the way
I wanted.

I'm disappointed in the lack of capability of XMLHTTP. Perhaps I
just missed something, but I was never able to really get POST
working with XML data.

And, oh, BTW, the site is:

http://wurlitzerbruck.com

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
.

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