One IE window update a form in another IE window?

[Noozer]

We have a web based tool used to report issues in our office. Many times the
users do not enter the required information to deal with the issue.
Unfortunately we don't have control of this application to update or modify
it.

I would like to create another web based tool where users would fill out a
form, click submit and the info from that form would be inserted to a
specifically named textarea box in a separate IE window.

A couple of factors that would affect this...
- The URL of the reporting tool does contain form data. I'm not sure if this
would affect detection of the current address in the browser.
- The name/ID of the textarea/textbox that I want to paste to is always the
same.
- The only browser to consider is IE as this is an INTRANET application.

Are any of the following scenarios possible?
- User has reporting tool open in one window at the proper page to enter
info. In another window they have our new form. They click submit and our
page inserts information into the other page.
- Same as above, but user has a different page than the reporting page. Can
our form detect what page is showing in the other browser window and issue a
warning to the user, or cause the other page to move to the correct
reporting page?
- User only has our page open. When they submit the form it opens the
reporting page in the same window and updates, or in a frame in the same
window and updates?

.... This should explain pretty much what I'd like to accomplish.

Currently when the user submits on our form it just copies the contents of
our form to the clipboard and pops up an alert box telling the user to "now
please paste your clipboard in the the problem report." It works, but it's
not very elegant.

Thanks!

 

[Noozer]

I assume Javascript isn't up to this task then...?

 

[Noozer]

Would a free lunch help? ;-)

Doh! I just want to know if it's at all possible, and maybe what object I'd
refer to as the "document" object isn't high enough up the tree to get me
out of my browser window and into the other browser window.

Couldn't you just copy the html page that the form is on and modify it?

Nope... No way of getting users to the new page. We have absolutely zero
control of the content on that server. We do have another server and
regulary create forms and templates on it and was hoping that we could get
our pages to interact with the other pages on the other server. Heck, even
just selecting a specific textbox and then sending keystrokes would be fine.

I mean a form comes down to a method attribute with a get or post
option. You just have to do the same get or post. Unless there is some
security method employed in the form, you should be able to submit your
modified form. I mean hackers try this all the time.

As much as I'd like to be able to directly submit data to the other site, it
just isn't possible.

Thanks for the reply though!

 

[Dag Sunde]

times

Doh! I just want to know if it's at all possible, and maybe what object I'd
refer to as the "document" object isn't high enough up the tree to get me
out of my browser window and into the other browser window.


Nope... No way of getting users to the new page. We have absolutely zero
control of the content on that server. We do have another server and
regulary create forms and templates on it and was hoping that we could get
our pages to interact with the other pages on the other server. Heck, even
just selecting a specific textbox and then sending keystrokes would be fine.

As much as I'd like to be able to directly submit data to the other site, it
just isn't possible.

I regularly control (fill inn and submit) html forms like that by writing
a small Visual Basic app that opens the form in an internal browser control,
fills inn the fields by the help of the DOM tree, and submit it. All under
the
control of the VB app...

Can that be an idea?

 

[Robert]

Nope... No way of getting users to the new page. We have absolutely zero

control of the content on that server. We do have another server and
regulary create forms and templates on it and was hoping that we could get
our pages to interact with the other pages on the other server. Heck, even
just selecting a specific textbox and then sending keystrokes would be fine.

This is a security issue. You need to work with pages on the same
domain. A page from one domain may not modify a page from another
domain.

Perhaps, you can lower the security restrictions in IE.

This is a bit outside my scope of knowledge.


There are keyboard mapping programs that let you write scripts to
simulate keystrokes. There used to debug windows applications.

Perhasps you can write a post processing routine to check the input
and send the user email to correct the bad form.

Robert

 

[Sam Nabialek]

You could have your form be part of a frameset with another frame loading the
original reporting tool. If you make that frame 0px x 0px it's invisible. You
then simply use javascipt to load up that frame in the header of your form
and then your submit action is to populate the orignal form and then submit it.

I've used the technique to allow large data sets to be uploaded to a server
(only way I could find to get past IE's 2k URL limitation).

Any good for you??