Compiling data from a form

They have: 117 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

Hello,

I'm currently using a form on my site to allow users to vote for officers in our organization. Currently, I receive an email indicating what the person entered on the form when he submits the form. I then have to manually tally the data that I receive. Is there a way to have the system automatically tally the results? Thanks.

Bob

Vincent Puglia's picture

They have: 634 posts

Joined: Dec 1999

Hi,

cgi.
if you have a guestbook, you might be able to send the info there -- place it in a var, read it, increment it, rewrite it by appending.

Vinny

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GrassBlade: cut&paste javascript
The Javascript Place Forums

Where the world once stood
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They have: 117 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

Vinny,

Thanks for the reply. I do have a guestbook, but I'm at a loss as to how I would place data sent to the guestbook into a var, then read it. Any chance that you would have some sample code of how to do that? Thanks again.

Bob

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

They have: 231 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

Vinny is right - you need CGI. You don'y need to get the results in email format, you can get this data sent directly to a script which can organise it for you. The script can store the data in a database or a text file.

I will move this post to the Cgi & Perl Forum.

:: Lloyd Hassell :: http://www14.brinkster.com/lloydh ::

They have: 453 posts

Joined: Jan 1999

Hi,

if your host only allows form2mail-cgis,
you can automate the local process.

Here's what I do:
- user enters data into form
- from2mail sends it to a special pop3 mailbox
- fetchmail takes the mail from that pop3 once every 6 hours
- procmail does some simple pre-sorting
- a small perl-script parses the data and puts it into a mySQL table

once every few days (or more often if needed) :
- another script runs and extracts all data from mySQL into "data"-files
- wml runs and packages "data" and templates
- sitecopy uploads the stuff

That's how the "news" on linux-history.org work.
(Well, there is some verification involved, but that's "nice to have" and not essential.)

They have: 117 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

Vinny, Adam, Lloyd and Anti -

Thanks for your responses. I found a place through the site Adam recommended that will let me basically do what I want, but I'd like to be able to do it myself (to have more control over the format and to avoid the advertising).

Lloyd, would it be possible to give me a small example of how I can have the data sent to a script for processing? I assume I would use the onSubmit="function()" in the <form> tag? This would allow me to process the data in a script? Then how can I write the data to a database at that point? If you could give me a small example, maybe I could figure it out from there.

Thanks again for all the help.

Bob

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