14.7.3.2 Parsing Forms with SANDCALL


14.7.3.2 Parsing Forms with SANDCALL - Continued

We clicked on the previous example's "Fetch it" link to submit a previously parsed form, and we get:

Netscape: Untitled

File Edit View Go Communicator

Location:

Submitting https://docs.thunderstone.com/texis/demos/message/dbexam.html

Result:

[Source Code] [Other Demos...] [Thunderstone Home]

This simple example allows you to create, search, and delete records from Texis database table. Your record was added.

Our submitform function pulled the needed information from the table, and used <submit> to send it. The results were then displayed.

submitform inserts dummy data for empty text variables; that's why we got "User nbsp;text nbsp;data " for the textarea box on this form.

We used a neat trick with the <setvar> function to set the <submit> variables: the arguments to <submit> are fixed, yet both their names and values must be dynamically obtained from the tables. <setvar> lets us set an arbitrary variable's value at run time, and <submit> lets us make the variable's names be variables themselves.

Other uses

The form data we parsed has other uses. We could attach it to a Web search engine, letting users know that a result page has a search form on it. Or we could make a search-engine search engine, letting users search for just "engines" instead of pages. Or we could probe forms on the 'net with a Web crawler, to find out what they contain perhaps: any page with a search form usually contains much more data behind it.

Back: Parsing Forms with SANDCALL - Continued

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