I've got a website that has a form that the user can type in. I want it to be the replacement for a 3rd party website (Autotask) form with the same fields. Normally I'd just have the action in my form go to where the 3rd party's form points and then have all the same id/name values for my own fields, but there are several problems with this:
Autotask's forms aren't just simple muli-field forms. They import at least 15 Javascripts that make something magic and unidentifiable happen, and they are incredibly difficult to read and understand. So that causes two problems, one that the form takes a very long time to load (5 seconds or so for 4 fields), and two is that if Autotask changes anything at all I'll need to redo the whole form (very tedious and crapshoot-y, and I already have needed to do it twice).
In order to make the load time more transparent, I put my copy of the Autotask form within an iFrame. That way the rest of the website can load separately from the expensive number of scripts I've got to include with Autotask's logon process.
Ideally what I want to be able to do is to just have those 4 fields on my site with whatever name and configuration I want, then send that POST data to my own PHP script, which will automatically (and transparently) submit that data directly through Autotask's forms in the proper fields. If I need to make the id/name match, that's okay. I can use HTML, Javascript, and PHP on this site.
EDIT:
Autotask has built-in GET handlers for their logins. You'll notice that you have a client ID at the login (it will be the "ci" variable in the URL). If you send a GET request with the client ID there and variables for "username" and "password," then it Autotask's login page will immediately forward you to the client page, given a successful login.
I think a lot of people would advise against this in general, as you're kind of hacking the functionality of someone else's app. In this case I only advise against it because they (Autotask) have an outward facing API already. http://www.autotask.com/press/news_and_press_releases/071006.htm I think that you'd be better off just utilizing it and developing something that functions pretty well within the constraints of their system.
one really round-about way of doing it is have your page load a form with some generic id/names. have a php script that scrapes their page for the correct id/names, and the ajax them into your forms.
That way you avoid having the load time of iframing their content in, or scraping their page on your initial page load and they change the id/names you'll always have it up to date.
I could write up a big post that explains on this, but really I think this is a perfect time to let someone else's words do the work.
Autotask's forms aren't just simple muli-field forms. They import at least 15 Javascripts that make something magic and unidentifiable happen, and they are incredibly difficult to read and understand.
Sounds like anti-spam measures to me? If so, then they will probably change over time.
So: follow NateDSaint's advice!
As a follow-up, it turns out that with Autotask they have GET handlers so you can just send information via GET. Problem solved.
Related
I've just started learning PHP and just done with $_POST/$_GET.
Now I want to know, what is the pro's and con's of having the PHP to process the data from a form inside the same file, or send the data to another file (action="anotherfile")?
Logically I will think that sending it to another file would increase the time process it, but is that true?
When I have the PHP script inside the same file, the page doesnt seem to reload when I hit the submit button (but the content changes). Or does it? If it does, wouldn't the only difference would be that I would have to type the script for the menu (lets say you have the same menu on all pages) in both files? Which would lead to more coding/less space?
what is the pro's and con's of having the PHP to process the data from a form inside the same file, or send the data to another file (action="anotherfile")?
You are conflating files and urls.
By having the logic split between different files (and then included where appropriate) you seperate concerns and make your code easier to manage.
By having a single URL be responsible for both displaying the form and processing the form data you don't end up in the awkward situation where the result of processing the form data requires that you redisplay the form with error messages in it. If you used two different URLs there you would need to either display the form on the processing URL (so you have two different URLs which display the form) or perform an HTTP redirect back to the original URL while somehow passing details of the errors to it.
Logically I will think that sending it to another file would increase the time process it, but is that true?
No. It makes no difference on the time scales being dealt with.
When I have the PHP script inside the same file, the page doesnt seem to reload when I hit the submit button (but the content changes).
It does reload.
If it does, wouldn't the only difference would be that I would have to type the script for the menu (lets say you have the same menu on all pages) in both files?
That's what includes are for.
In any language we always try to write clean code. That's why we follow MVC.
Logically I will think that sending it to another file would increase the time process it, but is that true? I think NO.
Because when we send data to another page and on another page at the top we echo that post data and exit. you will see it will not take time. it take time when we redirect/load some html page after that.
It does not matter where we sending data (same page or another page). matter is what is loading after that.
There is no difference about speed.
Whetever you post the content of your form in standard submit, this data will be sent to the server and a response (after processing ) will be downloaded.
The only difference is about organization of your code. The logic that draws themplate of page (menu or other fixed parts) should be stored in some file that you can include separately or call by a function.
Is also true that when you post your data you do for some reason, register a user for example. Is a good pratice that the php file that handles user registration will do that and output the messages and not other functions.
If your file has some logic switches that make it output either an empty form or a a registration message based on the presence of post or get variables, you will notice that when you scale to more complex tasks this will add complexity and make code mantainment harder.
I'll try to make sure I understand your question by restating it.
If you have a form (/form.php), and the "action" of that submit button leads you to a separate php page (/form_action.php), there is absolutely no difference in speed. Each HTTP request (form.php and form_action.php) is independent - "form_action.php" doesn't remember anything about "form.php" unless you pass that information through (as parameters). This is what people mean when they say that HTTP is stateless. It's worth learning about how HTTP works in general alongside the details of PHP.
If you have a PHP script which in turn includes other PHP scripts, there is a tiny performance impact - too small to measure in pretty much any case I've ever come across.
However, using includes allows you to separate your markup (the HTML) from the logic (the PHP). This is a really good thing if you are doing anything other than tinkering. It allows you to re-use functionality, it makes it much easier to change and maintain the code over time, and it helps you think through what you're trying to achieve.
There are many different ways people have solved the "how do I keep my code clean" puzzle; the current orthodoxy is "Model-View-Controller" (as #monty says). There are also PHP frameworks which make this a little easier to implement - once you've got the basics of the language, you might want to look at Zend or TinyMVC (there are several others, each with their benefits and drawbacks).
I have a PHP page with a simple form. One input text field & a button. Input text field accepts user queries & on button click an HTTP GET request is made to the server & the result has to be shown back in the same page containing the form. That's too simple to do. I can do this in two ways. One is AJAX & other one is the good old sodding form-submit method.
My question is simple- Which method should I use? Since both of the roads lead us to the same place, which one should I choose to travel?
First of all, let me talk about form submit method. I can use <?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] ; ?> as the action of the form for submitting the values of my form to the same page. Once I store those values into some random variables, I can make a GET request & obtain the result & show it to the world. This method is easy to use. Happy Down Voting to all of you.
Or I can make a GET request using AJAX and jQuery or JavaScript or whatever you wish to use & obtain the same result as in the previous case. Output is same. Only the mode of execution is different.
So which one is better? Which one fetches result faster? And why should I use that? Is there any difference? GET, POST, PUT or whatever- it doesn't really matter. AJAX or form-submit?
There shouldn't be any significant, genuine speed difference between them.
The Ajax approach will load a smaller amount of data (since you aren't loading an entire HTML document), but by the time you take into account HTTP compression and the fact that (if your system is sensibly configured) your dependancies (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc) will be cached, it won't be significantly smaller.
By using JavaScript to create a loading indicator and not refreshing the entire window in front of the user, you can create the illusion of a faster load time though. So if feeling faster was the only concern, then Ajax is the way forward.
Using JavaScript, however, is more complicated and slightly more prone to failure. The consequences of failure states are more severe because, unless your code detects and does something with them, the user will (not) see it fail silently. For example, if a normal page load times out because the user is on a train and went through a tunnel, they'll see an error page provided by their browser suggesting that they refresh and try again. With Ajax, you need to write the error handling code yourself. This does give you more flexibility (such as allowing you to simply try again a few times) but the work isn't done for you.
The other consequence of using Ajax is that the address bar will not update automatically. This means that the results won't be bookmarkable or sharable unless you do something explicit the make that possible. The usual way to do that is pushState and friends, but again, it is more work.
You should also make the site work without JavaScript so that if the JS doesn't run for any reason then the site won't break completely. If you use pushState then you have to do this for the URLs you are setting the address bar to point to to be useful.
The short answer: Use a regular form submission, then consider layering JavaScript over the top if you think it will give your visitors a worthwhile benefit.
I Should stick to an Ajax request when possible.
This because you then don't really have to load every single item on the page again ( like all the images, menu and so on ). You can just give the relevant HTML back and JQuery can place it inside the relevant holder.
But that is just my humble opinion...
If you have to retrive simple data from server without reload the page my advice is use jquery .get o .post
also it provides you a very large API that allows you to reduce your programming time.
http://api.jquery.com/
obviously the execution time increase but in my experience the user cant fell the differce with a simple ajax request.
so in my opinion if jquery allow you to obtain the results, this is the best solution because halves your work time!
See the edited one it may help you.
I think that AJAX should be used for displays updates and form submissions should be done via a page reload. Reasoning?
When submitting forms, you are telling the application to do something. Users tend to want to feel that it was done. When a page doesn't reload, users are often left wondering "Did that work?". Then they have to check to make sure what they did was right.
but when you are displaying a table or something, and the user says to "display x data....now x1 data" for instance, they aren't "doing" something (creating new entities, sending emails, etc). So AJAX can provide a nice user interface in this case. Page reloads would be annoying here.
In conclusion, I think form submission should be done via page reloads (let the user see it working), whereas display updates should use AJAX (prevent annoying page reloads).
Of course, this is a preference thing. Some of my company's applications use AJAX all over. But those are the applications that are the most difficult to maintain and debug. ;)``
This is very hard to explain but I'm going to try.
We run a motor shop that has a QC program. The program was coded in access97 and it's time for an upgrade, we have elected to try a PHP/MySQL approach to do this.
Right now the access software has several pages to the form and each box sends to the database live so when you type something in you don't have to hit a save button or next or anything and when you come back it's there.
Also the forms are driven by an auto-incremented job number that you can punch into a field at the top of the page and it query's the server and displays all the data in the form boxes so you can edit it.
I don't know how to even start this project. I got a working form and an insert.php page but I don't know how to go about the rest.
If I could get a pointer in the right direction that would be appreciated. Thanks!
You just want it to save automatically? You'll have to look into JavaScript, and more specifically AJAX. I recommend using the jQuery library. Basically, you're going to want to make an AJAX call every time your form field is modified, and that AJAX call will simply update one field in particular.
I understand you are likely very new to website design, so this might be complicated for you.
I would read through this W3Schools tutorial. After reading through that, I'd pay close attention to this tutorial.
Again, this is difficult for beginners. I'd recommend you continue to work at your script, and ask more specific questions here on StackOverflow as time goes on. Good luck!
I have created a simple example here:
HTML/JS:
shaquin.tk/experiments/ajax.html,
PHP: shaquin.tk/experiments/qc.txt.
Have a look at the source to see how it works (I also have some comments in my code), feel free to copy it and modify for your own needs.
To sum up how it works:
When text is typed into a text box, a list of changed elements is updated.
Every updateInterval milliseconds (default 1000), the list is checked. (This helps reduce traffic and lag.) If anything has changed, the PHP file is called to update the database, and the list is cleared.
If an element loses focus and it has changed (e.g. copy/paste), the PHP file is called.
The PHP file sanitizes the query, checks for a valid job number, and updates the database.
References:
AJAX XMLHttpRequest
setInterval
addEventListener
encodeURI
mysqli_connect
mysqli_query
mysqli_real_escape_string
You'll need to submit the data as an ajax request. That way the data can be sent and returned without the page needing to be reloaded to update the information.
On one of my pages I have users queue up search terms to be to queried from a 3rd party API. As they're building the queue, my site is making the queries in the background (through ajax) so I can cache the responses, saving them time when they submit. I store a session variable $_SESSION['isloading'] as true during the time that the background queries are running, and its false when they're done.
When they submit, the results page waits for $_SESSION['isloading'] to be false before querying the cache for result. Meanwhile they're shown a progress wheel.
Is there a name for this technique of using a session to locally "lock" a user before proceeding to the next step in the code? I came up with this approach on my own and was wondering if it is a common (or good) solution to this problem, and is used elsewhere.
Putting it in $_SESSION will be a wasted effort. Been there, done that and it didn't work out.
You will be much better off if you provide your "search query string" in as a $_GET variable for your XHR ( marketing people call it - Ajax ).
Off the top of my head, this sounds a little similar to the way some older forum software performs forum searches in the background, and the visible page does a repeated refresh until the background search is complete.
I don't think there's a name for it; I'm also note entirely convinced that it's a great solution. As stevecomrie pointed out, you're going to run into difficulties with concurrency (unless the session variable's name is unique per search query).
I'd instead recommend an XmlHttpRequest (as teresko points out, it's not really called "AJAX", ugh!) and you can handle the "waiting" quite simply with Javascript.
I asked about this on IRC (Hat-Tip to ##php on freenode), and they suggested I just make the search form and search results one page. Then, when they're done entering their searches the view would change rather than submitting to the next page. This would remove the necessity of keeping track of an 'isloading' state. This seems like a better approach to me, are there any problems with it?
Thanks everybody. (For some reason I couldn't up vote answers, so everyone wins today :] thanks again!)
Complete php and javascript novice here, apologize up front for anything half-witted.
I have a portion of a user's profile in which I'd like the user to be able to add additional items of the same thing, with slightly different conditions.
For example, let's say it's favorite books. A fieldset contains some checkboxes for genre and an input text box for the title of a book. After the user checks a genre and fills in a title, they can add the book to their set of favorite books and then have the option to add another. When done adding books, they move on to the next fieldset, complete the form and submit.
How is this done? And more-importantly, is it possible without javascript?
Without JS, I understand this probably entails a lot of reloading of the page to add the items, regardless I'm more confused about how the $_POST data is handled, both before and after the submit.
Sorry for such an open ended question, really just looking for someone to point me in the right direction, as searching for this topic proved to be a bit difficult.
Thanks.
Some Clarification
I'm trying to develop an application that is as independent of javascript as possible. In that sense, I don't know if it's possible to add the new items with PHP alone. My sense is the fieldset in question could have it's own submit button, the action of which POSTS to the page itself (no DB interaction, etc), and variables like $book_genre1, $book_title1 are populated in the page. Then, the "official" submit is sent later, which actually adds the POST data, which contains the books array, to the DB. But I don't know if that is a safe procedure or good logic to begin with.
In reply to the above answer, if that is exactly what you need since I seem to have a different idea.
You simply store each addition in an array stored inside a session variable, and in each page load, parse the data into readable html.
$_SESSION['form'][] = serialized_form_data;
On each load,
foreach ($_SESSION['form'] as $form) {
unserialize_data_and_create_html();
}
add_new_form_element();
I'm assuming you want to show the user already filled forms so he can deal with them as he wishes.
This is a better implementation than what I thought of earlier. I wanted to implement a db version.
Sorry for the delay. I can't comment since I'm mobile (js issues) so I decided to edit instead.
You can simply use the $_SESSION['form'] for your inserts.
A simple foreach will work as well. However, remember to sanitize each value properly before inserting it. That's the key.
If you use prepared statements with binding, you have the advantage of clean input as well as better database performance.
What you're really asking is how to persist information between POSTs of the same form. The most common and effective way of doing so is to just use the inputs on the form. If you have information that shouldn't be displayed then use hidden input elements for them.
Note that storing information in the form like this is not considered secure since it can be manipulated and/or forged, so the next option is to store it in the session; since it is server-side only the cookie/session ID needs to be protected. The values can then be retrieved from the session in PHP after the POST has occurred.
Before you submit a form...there is no data to handle. Once a form is submitted data then is sent to the server in the form of an array.
(From php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.post.php):
$_POST = "An associative array of variables passed to the current script via the HTTP POST method."
So a user submits some data to the server. Now that data is available to your scripts for use: Populate a database, validate the values before doing "x", write HTML to the client, etc.
I like where #frosty is going with his approach. It does potentially send multiple requests to the server, but it's also a very straight forward approach. A completely server-side solution.
JavaScript or the jQuery Library would allow you to accomplish a similar result, and post to the server just once - by simply hiding/showing populated fields, writing additional fields to the form dynamically (eg: After completing "book #1" the user can click "Add another" and JS writes an identical set of form fields all referencing book #2). Obviously, this approach will get more involved than a straight PHP approach. And you'll need a backup plan if you want to allow users with JS disabled to participate.
I would suggest you use javascript to handle the user adding multiple items. Check out jQuery (http://www.jquery.com) which is a fantastic javascript library that will help you do lots of great dynamic things.
Then once you have all of the information from the user, just once it all at once to your php and save it. For information about to access and use $_POST or $_REQUEST, you'll need to check out some PHP tutorials or pick up a book. That's fairly basic PHP stuff and too large a topic for this thread.