Saving Forms Data to Client Side

[Dave White]

Hello everyone,

I have prepared a series of lessons for my students on CDs for our
small computer lab.

At the end of each lesson they take a short quiz using HTML forms.

Is there some way to save their quiz answers to the local drive.
My hope is to avoid server-side processing.

I'm not able to e-mail the data to myself using Internet Explorer.
(This technique does, however, work in Firefox on my home
computer...!!!)

Thanks in advance,
Dave

 

[Brian Cryer]

Hello everyone,

I have prepared a series of lessons for my students on CDs for our
small computer lab.

At the end of each lesson they take a short quiz using HTML forms.

Is there some way to save their quiz answers to the local drive.
My hope is to avoid server-side processing.

I'm not able to e-mail the data to myself using Internet Explorer.
(This technique does, however, work in Firefox on my home
computer...!!!)

Thanks in advance,
Dave

You should be able to have the form email the answers to you even with
Internet Explorer. Yes, IE goes through a number of dialogs, first a warning
and then a confirmation, but it does work - at lest it does for me (ie 7).

I know you said your students are working off a cd that you provide, but are
you assuming that they are on-line at the same time? If they are then why
not post the quiz up somewhere on the net and use php/formmail (or whatever)
to do the test and send you the results. If you want people to be able to do
your test off-line then of course neither this nor the email approach would
work.

An alternative approach would be to wrap the browser in your own
application. This would mean that your students would have to run your
application to work through the series of lessons (but they could still be
written in html, so no changes required there). If your programming skills
are up to it then take a TWebBrowser (Delphi) or AxWebBrowser (any MS
development tool), drop it into an application and provide the necessary
hooks to catch the form submit and then drop the results to a file. Not as
difficult as it sounds IF you know what you are doing. If you want to look
at this route but don't have the necessary skills then drop me a line, I
could probably knock up a working prototype so you could see if its what you
wanted.