Capture Information

[alfie002]

Hello All,

I am fairly new to the HTML world. I have a general question rather than a technical. I want to capture information from the user, via the keyboard, and write this information to a file on disk. Also, I would like to be able to read the information from the file on disk and display on the screen in HTML ??

What would be the best approach for this ?

thanks

Alf

 

[nickdel]

Hi Alfie, I assume you mean you want a user to fill in a form and then you collect this information and add to a database? If so you are going to need some sort of server side scripting (ASP, PHP etc...).

You can then use your chosen server language to display the results on a browser (in html).

Cheers

Nick

 

[alfie002]

hello Nickdel,

thanks for the response. Nickdel, sort off. I want to be able to capture information from the user, write it to a formatted file on disk. Then have the abilility to re-read this file and display on screen.

Does your recommendation still apply ?

Many thanks

Alf

 

[nickdel]

Pretty much, not sure what you mean by formatted file but certainly with ASP you can read/write from text files etc...

Nick

 

[alfie002]

ok Nickdel,

fixed format eg:


variable=datavalue
variable=datavalue


I'll give the ASP a go.

Many thanks

Alf

 

[nickdel]

Ideally you should put all this into an XML file and then it is possible to read and write (writting I have never done this but apparently you can!) this using Javascript.

Just another angle however I would say simpliest way would be to use server scripting.

Nick

 

[1DMF]

nickdel -> is that right you can write to files on a clients machine using JavaScript?

i thought the ONLY thing you can do interms of accessing any sort of file system via a client browser was using cookies otherwise this is potentially a serious security risk?

is this not the case?

"In complete darkness we are all the same, only our knowledge and wisdom separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you.

 

[nickdel]

1DMF, your quite right. Sorry, I wasn't very clear before. I actually meant write the XML code using Javascript but then passing this as a string to the server.

Have saw a few AJAX apps do this!

Nick

 

[1DMF]

ah , AJAX!

either way they will need some server side code to process the data / AJAX request.

"In complete darkness we are all the same, only our knowledge and wisdom separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you.