How do I keep a form posting invisible to the user?

CODE

Hi,

I've added a 3rd party SMS hub to my PHP web site that enables my users to send SMSes. What actually happens is a standard HTML form posting to the 3rd party hub address, which takes the data posted, and sends the SMS.

Once finished, the 3rd party hub returns a set of XML codes that explains what happened with that posting (successful / unsuccessful / why).

What I need to do is keep that posting invisible to my users, send the data to that site in the form of a HTML post, retrieve the XML codes, and display my own result page saying "Your message was sent.... etc...". That's where I'm stuck...

How do I keep that posting invisible to my users so they don't have to see the XML result page?

Thanks!

yuraupt

You can do it like that:

1) user posts form data to your server
2) your server side script posts appropriate request to 3rd party SMS server
3) then the script read and parse the result
4) sends back a customised response to the user

Here is the example how to post and get response from the server side script to another server:

    $post_data['var1'] = 'value1';
    $post_data['var2'] = 'value2';

$host = "www.remotehost.com";
$url = "/cgi-bin/some.cgi";

//create a string with all the posted data...
$request = "";
foreach ($post_data as $key => $value) {
    $value = urlencode(stripslashes($value));
    $request .= "&$key=$value";
}


//create headers
$header .= "POST $url HTTP/1.0\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
$header .= 'Content-Length: ' . strlen($req) . "\r\n\r\n";
$fp = fsockopen ($host, 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);

if (!$fp) {
    // ERROR
    echo "ERROR $host <BR>";
    echo "$errstr ($errno)";
} else {
    // post the request
    fputs ($fp, $header . $request);
    // get the response
	$response = "";
    while (!feof($fp)) {
        $response .= fgets ($fp, 1024);
    }
    fclose ($fp);
    //echo $response;
}

CODE

Wow... That's EXACTLY what I was looking for. This method not only solves that problem, but a couple of others too! Thank you so much!