auto submit form info to form pages belonging to many different sites

[pushyr]

i had someone ask me recently if i can create one form that can submit information to other forms belonging to 100 or so websites. namely to holiday property websites.

2 issues first come to mind...

1) the mandatory fields differ for every website
2) some forms might have captcha image text that needs to be typed in

the only solution i can really think of to do this would be a robot (written in php?) that can do whatever it must to submit the information. although, i've never built one of these before or ever looked into the methods or theories behind them!!

before i stand firm on the limitations, what would you guys suggest or what direction would you point me in?

 

[vacunita]

Its going to be difficult, if not impossible, as you well said, each site would have a totally different form, so its expectations would be completely different on the processing side. Even if you could somehow account for all the differences its hardly something one would actually want to do. Also what happens with forms that have Javascript to some other complex scripting to modify inputs or change entries before submission etc...

Not sure what exactly what would be the end gain on this, but if what you want is to centralize the forms in a single location: perhaps not submitting the form, but actually just capturing the page the form is in for each of the websites, and display that instead to be filled?

Perhaps a drop down,with the websites to select, and upon selection your PHP could go and read the form from the site and display it. That way you don't need to worry about differences. You display the form as it appears on the site, and just submit to the site.

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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[pushyr]

thanks vacunita!