Yoz's Form Linker, which is so alpha it's not true
What the hell's this?
A little while ago my friend Sean was moaning about
certain forms on the web which make it incredibly difficult to link to if you wanted to link
to the results. The example he gave was this
page on the National Blood Service site. Suppose you want to link to a specific result of
that form, say, all the blood donation points around my area (NW4 1LN), you can't. (You can
try putting the required CGI variables into the URL as part of the GET string, but it won't
work)
The whole point of this service is to make simple form linking
possible
Of course, this isn't just for silly POST forms which should be GETs. It's for any form that's just far too long and hideously complicated to try and send as one big URL.
Note: This is all totally alpha and I never got around to finishing it
properly because nobody seemed to want it. If you find it useful and
think I should work on improving it,
let me know!
Here's how it works:
- Type in the URL of the page with the form in it.
- The page will come up.
- Fill it in as you want it to be filled and submit it.
- If all goes to plan, you'll see a magic message from the linker saying that it's stored
the form details. It'll give you a URL.
- If all goes further to plan, going to that URL will magically submit the form!
Here's how it doesn't work (yet)
- Won't work in browsers that can't do Javascript (needed to submit the form)
- Won't handle HTTPS
- Definitely won't handle file upload (and please don't try it)
- Probably a ton of other ways that my 10 minute testing didn't discover
Now test it for me! Test! As if the very hounds of hell were on your trail!
New for IE5/Win users! The Form Linker Web Accessory. So alpha it pains.
Possible future features being thought about:
- Simple long-URL memoizing, like what makeashorterlink.com does
- Building the HTML filter out of proper HTML-parsing/tree-handling code rather than
nightmare regexes (the client-side version uses DOM, like it should)
- HTTPS handling
- Cookie setting
- Thanking Lincoln Stein because CGI.pm made this a lot easier