HTML form - fill from server side file

[Scott_Arm]

If you had an HTML form and you wanted to fill out certain fields from data in a server side file, how would you do it? Would you use PHP? My particular application is running on a linux server.

I have a table and when you fill out the first field, I want to fill out the remainder of that row based on the user input.

 

[Malo]

You need a server side AND client side scripting for that. eg. PHP for the server side content retrieval, and java for the client side to fill the form fields (assuming you want the fields to be filled automatically without submitting a form). If you only had a fairly small amount of data for the table and it didn't really change much or often, you could do it with java alone and the data can go in arrays.

I don't know anything about aspx to comment about its capabilities, it might be able to do all of it.

 

[Scott_Arm]

You need a server side AND client side scripting for that. eg. PHP for the server side content retrieval, and java for the client side to fill the form fields (assuming you want the fields to be filled automatically without submitting a form). If you only had a fairly small amount of data for the table and it didn't really change much or often, you could do it with java alone and the data can go in arrays.

I don't know anything about aspx to comment about its capabilities, it might be able to do all of it.

I would like teh form to be filled in without submitting the form. I've only ever done really simple things where a task could be completed with one or the other.

Basically it's an odering page. I have a catalog that's an excel file, and people enter there orders into an order form manually from the information in the catalog. People are making mistakes entering the information, so what I'd like to do is have the person enter a part number, and then have the description and price entered automatically from the catalog. I'll convert the catalog to a csv file and put it on the server hosting the page. From there, I know I could parse the csv file using PHP, but I'm unclear on how I'd have the form update fields without submitting.

 

[BRiT]

As mentioned, any combination of Server-side and Client-side support is needed. It could be php and javaScript or php and vbScript or ruby and javaScript/vbScript ... or .NET and javaScript/vbScript or Java and javascript/vbScript or cgi-bin and javaScript/vbScript or perl and javaScript/vbScript. Or you could bloat the client-side and go with embeded Flash objects.

Currently, I would choose .NET and Atlas.

Look into AJAX, it allows for mini-updates persay without having the user click on submit. Behind the scene what you'd do is script an event to call the server getProductInformation(partNumber), when the client-side receives the response, it would use javaScript/vbScript to dynamicly update the description and price fields using the information returned from the getProductInformation() call.

Some reference links:
http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/xmlhttpreq.html
http://www.javascriptkit.com/jsref/index.shtml
http://rajshekhar.net/blog/archives/85-Rasmus-30-second-AJAX-Tutorial.html
http://www.quirksmode.org/

 

[Bludd]

I would try RIFE if you are interested in writing the web application in Java.