user info...

Anon

Hi,
I'm trying to get info about the user's computer (screen size, local time, color depth, etc) and store it in php variables to be logged. These things can be found with javascript, but how can I get these values into php. I do not want to reload the page so javascript seems to be out. Does anyone have suggestions as to how I could do this?

Thanks so much,
Kevin

jordan

You've figured out already that you need to pass these values to another PHP script. There are several ways to do this, though none of them are very elegant and they all use JavaScript. One is to open a JavaScript popup window like so:

onLoad='javascript:void(temp=open('script.php?javascriptvars','dial','toolbar=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,menubar=no,status=no,directories=no,location=no,width=100,height=100'))

Have JavaScript fill in the stuff after "script.php?" .. then have the PHP script generate the JavaScript code to close the window once it's gathered the data. One problem with this method is that many users (including myself) have been trained to close popup windows before they've a chance to load.

A second option would be to have a very small (1x1) image tag near the top of your page. Have this image point to a PHP script in a similar method as above (have JavaScript fill in values after the question mark), and once the script has collected the data, have it return the image data, a la include("1x1image.gif");. Just make sure you don't return any text in the same script -- you may also need to use header() to tell the browser that you're returning an image.

One of these methods should work for you -- I'd recommend the second. Many free stats services (e.g. Stats4All) use a similar method to collect similar data.

jjoske

javascript treats forms as objects so you should be able to create a javascript function that records all values you need in a form.

jordan

John,

From what I could tell from KGMoney's post, he's not asking the user for these values, he's using JavaScript to request them from the browser. However, I could be mistaken.

jordan

In hindsight, and with some inspiration from John, there some other ways to do this:

You could have the user click on a link with href="script.php?javascriptvars" and have JavaScript fill in the bits after the question mark (as above), or if the user happens to be submitting a form anyway, you could have JavaScript store the values in hidden form fields. These methods would be helpful if the user was going through a registration process or if your site had a splash page.

jjoske

No you can set the form values without asking the users input as per script below:

<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" onload="set()";>
<script>
function set()
{
document.info.colordepth.value=window.screen.colorDepth;

</script>
<form name="info" method="post" action="">
<input type="hidden" name="colordepth">
</form>
</body>

Anon

Thank you both so much for your help. I think I will try the image method mentioned by Jordan. I had tried this before but I guess I wasn't doing it right (trying to 'echo' the img and not 'include'ing it).

Thanks again!