Re: LYNX-DEV How to fill up the forms off-line?

[David Woolley]

> 
>         Is there a way to download a typical questionnaire or a form, go
> home and fill it up peacefully, and then return with all work done
> off-line, and upload it to the party, the owner of the form? Preferably so
> that the form owners do not preceive any difference between this approach
> and on-line form filling. 

This depends on the nature of the form and whether the site is maintaining
session state.  If they are maintaining session state, and more and more
people are, for various reasons, including market research and flashier
responses (tools like Microsoft's ASP make it easier to maintain a session
than do this any other way), it will be almost certain that the site will
have forgotten about your session before you return to it (some of the
search engines are prone to this).

The other variable is whether the form is a GET or POST form.  GET forms
can be handled with any old version of Lynx, POST forms may need a relatively
recent one.  In both cases, if you are using DOS, you will almost cerntainly
have to hand URL encode the response (for Unix, I would have run my
own local web server and written a trivial CGI script to capture the 
response).

If you are very lucky, you may be able to run a forms mode browser on your
machine, and if you are even more lucky, you may be able to capture the 
full URL for a GET mode form, even though the request fails.  To do this,
you will have to change POST to GET in the form tag, and change the action
in that tag to be an absolute URL.

If the problem site is using GET mode forms, you should be able to 
paste that URL into the g option of Lynx.  If they are using POST mode,
you will need to place everything after the question mark in a file and
use the command line option to post data.  If you can't get command line
access, you are lost for POST mode forms.

> 
>         I would also appreciate a step by step advice, as to what to do, 
> when faced with a form, part of which consists of questionnaire that could 
> be easily enough answered directly, but which contains some text areas. How 
> to direct there (into the text areas) my text failes, prepared in advance? 

That is a question about your terminal emulator, not Lynx.  Actually, I suspect
that scripting your terminal emulator might be the best solution for the
full form as well.

> ... rather than typing in manually, which seems to be the only way to me now 
> - a solution might be simple, but I just do not see it...
> 
>       In case it matters:
>         My access to WWW is through Lynx on my ISP site, where I have a
> Unix shell account, which I access through VT100 emulation of Telix
> communication program. At home, I work on an IBM PC, in DOS (not Windows). 

It's an unfortunate fact of life that you don't fit the profile of the sort
of customer that many sites with long forms are after, so don't expect them to
make life easy.

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