Forms suggestion

neuss@igd.fhg.de
Wed, 24 Nov 93 19:50:04 +0100


Dear fellow Webbers,

we are currently playing around with forms, and have run into the problem
that it's difficult to identify from which HTML document a query has been
initiated. This information can be quite important, since it

a) enables you to have one /htbin/query script to server different
classes of form documents, and
b) in the case of virtual documents (e.g. result of a database query)
it gives you a possibility to encode things like state of a transaction.

It would at least be a very nice feature to e.g. have the name of the

original file as part of the URL given (I'm not sure what the state
of the CGP spec is, so please excuse me if that is already the case).

It'd be even more usefull to have some "invisible" attribute which could

serve as an additional means of passing info to the server. Let me give
you an example: You want to program a userinterface for some relational
database application like e.g. a reservation system. Different users
can log in and do all kinds of operations. Now in order to identify
the specific user (and thus his/her transaction), it'd be nice to create
a virtual HTML document with some kind of "transaction id". This could be

done by supplying some attributes that are not visible in the HTML browser,
but would create additional "name=value" pairs that are passed to the server.
The document could look like:
<FORM ACTION="http://turkey/htbin/query">
...
<ATTRIBUTE NAME="transactionid" VALUE="42">
</FORM>
which would not be displayed in the browser, but be passed to the server
just like the other fields.

What do you think? Those who develop database frontend certainly have run
into similar problems. IMHO, this does not add to much overhead, since it
has no consequences for the server side, and adds only very little to the
server software.

Many greetings,
Chris

--
/*
 *  Christian Neuss  %  neuss@igd.fhg.de  %  ..in the humdrum
 */