Offline saving of form data

[Victor Engmark]

Background: People want to be able to record large amounts of product
data ("a few MB") on laptop or tablet PCs without _any_ kind of network
connection, and then to submit the data to a database in the office come
the end of the day. The installed base of the machines is controllable,
but should include familiar concepts and structures, and it should be
easy to deploy on many computers. The solution will be used for
approximately two years.

Concept: For this I am doing a feasibility study on XHTML, with tables
of forms to submit the data, IE as the browser, and some kind of script
to pack the data into XML.

Problem: Does anyone know if this is feasible in JavaScript, or any
other client-side scripting language natively supported by IE? I found
two solutions:
- http://www.acky.net/tutorials/javascripts/cookies/, which seems to
only be able to save the information into cookies, without prior
formatting, and
- http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/fields_form.html, which can't
handle more than 4 KB of data.

URLs to examples or concepts explained would also be welcome.

 

[kaeli]

Background: People want to be able to record large amounts of product
data ("a few MB") on laptop or tablet PCs without _any_ kind of network
connection, and then to submit the data to a database in the office come
the end of the day. The installed base of the machines is controllable,
but should include familiar concepts and structures, and it should be
easy to deploy on many computers. The solution will be used for
approximately two years.

Concept: For this I am doing a feasibility study on XHTML, with tables
of forms to submit the data, IE as the browser, and some kind of script
to pack the data into XML.

Can't they just put the data into an Excel file and upload it to the
server (via any application, ftp, whatever), which parses and saves it
as XML?

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/01/09/q-and-a.html


--

 

[Victor Engmark]

Can't they just put the data into an Excel file and upload it to the
server (via any application, ftp, whatever), which parses and saves it
as XML?

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/01/09/q-and-a.html

For several reasons:
- Avoiding the extra parsing of Excel files
- Being able to navigate faster (links vs. Excel tabs)
- Smaller files to transfer
- The ability to use the same sheet online and offline
- Error avoidance, e.g. using maxlength="X"
- On-the-fly error checking
- Easy reformatting using CSS
- Guidelines and help files in pop-up windows or embedded in the page,
e.g. using <span title="User name (8 characters)">Owner</span>
- Familiarity for new users
- More space for relevant stuff (F11 vs. any normal Excel window)

 

[Richard Cornford]

Concept: For this I am doing a feasibility study on XHTML,
with tables of forms to submit the data, IE as the browser, ...

<snip>

As IE doesn't support XHTML yet, that combination should not be
considered feasible.

The need for local storage, combined with the exclusive use of IE makes
it sound like HTA would be worth investigating.

Richard.