PHP Autofiller

MasterCJ

Greeting one and all!

I have a fairly difficult question to ask and to be answered for all you PHP experts out there - I am certainly not one!

I am attempting to create a php script/app that will retrieve information from my SQL database and 'autofill' a html form with the data. Then after the webpage/html form has been 'filled', i want to submit the data i have entered, automatically.

This is complex because:

No one website has the exact same html form and thus for each site
I want to 'autofill' with my data, I will have to create the a

unique algortihm to do so.
I am not sure how php would connect to another site
I am not sure how php would 'autofill' in boxes on another site
I am not sure how php would 'click' the submit button

This project is intended to streamline one of the most human intensive portions of my company (www.boc-recruit.com): filling in job descriptions on ESL teaching job websites (such as http://www.eslteachersboard.com/cgi-bin/esljobs/index.pl?form=0)

This project is NOT intended to be used for spamming purposes AT ALL!
I am simply trying to save hours of labourious filling time!

My ultimate goal is to have a database of jobs and a database of website and their repective forms and 'autofill' algorithms, and to be able to log onto my autofiller php form add a new job and then submit it to 20 or 30 job websites with the click of a button.

Any help at all would be greatly appricated! Thanks in advance!

etully

CJ, What you are designing is called a kludge. (Ironically, it's the second time today I've seen this request on the board.) It's almost certainly unnecessary.

HTML forms are designed to be seen and filled in by humans. If you don't need the human to do anything, then you can do all this on the server without creating a form or "auto-submitting" the form.

For example, let's say it was a simple form with one field called "x". So you build the form, prepopulate the field "x" with a value of 42. Then Javascript clicks the submit button for you and the form's contents (x=42) get passed to a script called process.php. You could accomplish the exact same thing by simply reading in the values from the database, assigning the values to the appropriate variables and including process.php (loading and calling the functions that are in that script). This way is direct, simple, and doesn't require a Javascript kludge.

Sure, sometimes kludges are necessary to save time and money on development but in this case, it's going to save you time and money to skip the whole pre-populate the form / autosubmit step.

Any decent programmer should be able to write what you need pretty quickly.

If you are really really certain that you need the kludge, then we can show you how to pre-populate a form and then include a javascript command (onload="form.submit()" or something like that) but that's really just bad design.

Please describe your work flow a little more. Is this something to save customers time? Or to save your internal employees time? Where does the process start? Who does what that leads up to this form prepopulating and autosubmitting?

Kudose

Well ... I learned a new word today ... two actually ...

Kludge and Bodge - bodge is a synonym for kuldge for those like me who had no clue what a kludge was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kludge

🙂 Thanks etully - for vicariously informing me too.

etully

Thanks for vicariously informing me too.

No problem, I live to vicariously inform.

Kudose

lol man ... lol

MasterCJ

etully wrote:
Please describe your work flow a little more. Is this something to save customers time? Or to save your internal employees time? Where does the process start? Who does what that leads up to this form prepopulating and autosubmitting?

Hi Etully,

thanks for the reply!

The work flow of this process is as follows:

manager creates a job description (job id, job title, salary, start date, etc)
worker goes to websites and fills out the html forms with the job description data
rinse and repeat

With 3 new jobs/day and 30 websites to fill in, this process is very labourious.

I was thinking that it would ideal if the manager could enter the data into a sql database and then some php magic happens with the click of a button and the job description gets posted on multiple websites. That is oversimplified, but the core functionality that i'm looking for.

Thanks again for the help!

etully

Oh, I see. You don't own the other 30 web sites. They are job boards or something.

Ok. Then this is what you have to do. (This will probably take a day or two for you to accomplish but it's still going to save you lots of time in the long run).

First, go to OtherWebsite #1 and look at their form. Do a view source. Find the Form Action. It will probably be something like "input_job.php" or "get_data.cfm" or "form2.asp" or whatever. Next, find the names of all the fields in that form. (They will be things like "job_description", "salary", etc.) Now do the same for the other 29 web sites.

Once you have all that, you can write a PHP script like this:

Step 1. Open SQL database, find all the job data for all the new jobs.
Step 2. Start a loop that goes through the jobs one at a time.
Step 3. Open a curl session to the form Action of OtherWebSite #1. Pass all the post fields in a way that is specific to the field names that you discovered when you did a view source on WebSite #1.

Repeat Step 3 for each web site that you want to post to.

Then end the loop. By ending the loop, it will get the next job from your SQL database and post IT to the 30 web sites. And that will continue for all the new jobs.

So your work flow will be this:

Manager creates new job description. (or as many as she wants) These go into your SQL database.
Use a web browser to hit your PHP script on your server. It will submit all the new jobs to the 30 web sites. This will probably take about 2-4 seconds per web site instead of the human time of 2-4 minutes per web site.

I hope that's clear. Curl isn't tough. It's about 10 lines of code. You can copy most of the lines from samples at php.net

Your script is going to look like this:

Open SQL. Read list of new jobs.

Mark all new jobs as "Being Posted"
Loop over that list
1st Curl
2nd Curl
3rd Curl
....
30th Curl
End Loop
Change any jobs that were "Being posted" in your SQL database to "Successfully Processed"

Hope that helps.

MasterCJ

etully,

You da man! I'll keep you updated with my progress - this is my first attempt at PHP. 🙂