Form post on a webpage

[Clunes]

Has anyone been able to go to a web page form and populate fields on the form with data in a db? I want to save a user registration time on a thrird party site by simply entering the main fields with the defaults already stored in the db

[Steve Wood]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Yes this is no problem. If you use a dialog the fields are populated in the Activate Event. You do need some key id to determine which record you want. So if the URL had maybe ?id=12345 you would lookup that value in the table, grab the field values for that record, and then populate the dialog field. They are populated with syntax: currentform.controls.myfield = tbl.myfield. Obviously that line needs to go within your xbasic statement that returns the values from the table.

[Clunes]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Thanks Steve, got a slight hurdle in this at the moment. I cannot get to the page as it embedded as ieframe and I think using a flash form. I cannot view the page source so it is a little bit of a trial

[Steve Wood]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Flash? I obviously thought this would be an A5 form.

[Clunes]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Sorry might not have explained it properly. I want to bring up a signup page on the web from within a desktop db, then populate the main fields with data like name address from data in my DB. Then all I need do is click the signup button. I have got to the signup page oK and can see the fields now, but trying to work out if I can put text in them.

[Steve Wood]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Well, normally if you have a field named "Name" and you include "name" as a parameter in the URL that opens that control, it will populate the field. I still don't know if you have an Alpha grid as your registration form, or a Flash form. The URL might be like this: mydomain.com?name=steve

[Clunes]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Steve. It is not my registration form it is a third party. I do not know what they use. I have been able to get the page to load, but as the actual registration fields are embedded in a a flash. I cannot get focus of the fields to input text. I tried ?lastname= but that fails. I thought send_keys() might work, but this is foiled by the focus issue. I will keep playing. The page I am trying to enter the data into is:

https://www.smsbroadcast.com.au/signup

[Clunes]

Re: Form post on a webpage

I actually found a shareware program that does what I want - this was to prove it can be done. Just need to workout how I can do from inside alpha. My problem as the moment seems be to I cannot get focus of the web page until I mouse click on it. Once I do that the tab key statrts to work. Another interesting fact. While at first I could not see the source code to the page, once I opened the page in Alpha I could.

[Steve Wood]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Did this work out? I can't see how a shareware program can do something that you cannot do direct from Alpha. The target form is just HTML (not Flash).

[Clunes]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Haven't get there yet. I can seem to get focus to the fields. I have tried your suggestions, 'but alas poor yorick'. I agree if the shareware program can do so should Alpha. I appreciate the help. If I get the solution I will certainly post it here.

[Finian Lennon]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Mark:

Do a forum search for "screen scraping" or variants on that. There have been discussions on how to pull data into Alpha from web forms of different types.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Form post on a webpage

I seem to remember an article on that at www.learn alpha.com

[Lenny Forziati]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Do you need to actually display the form and fill the fields, or just submit what the form submits and receive the response? In many cases, there is no need to show the web form, and the programming is much simpler.

[Clunes]

Re: Form post on a webpage

By using the http_get_page2() function I noted the actual fields on the page are built into another page which is called by https://www.smsbroadcast.com.au/ajax/signup.php When I put this into the URL line I now get to see the fields as anothert page. Still can't seem to get the parameters to populate any of the fileds on this page.

[Clunes]

Re: Form post on a webpage

Bingo! Thank you Stan that document reference got me going. I have now successfully created an xdialog that brings up the web page. using the built in xdialog events to web page the following works for the page I am looking at

function documentcomplete as v (pDisp as P,URL as A)
myurl.object.document.getElementById("firstname")="mark"
myurl.object.document.getElementById("lastname")="pearson"
end function