Start form automatically

Anon

Hi,

I'm having a problem with a payment system I'm trying to get to work.

If a form is filled out with the necessary information writes a text file automatically, which is necessary for the payment system to work.

This all works, but within the $submit area I want to do a post to a cgi file automatically. I can't change this CGI file because that's part of the payment service provider.

The idea of the page is this:

if ($submit) {

Area where the file is created and written to.
I want this part to call the CGI file automatically (so without having to press another button)

} else {

Area which contains the form. Normally I would call the CGI file here but I call the PHP file because I want the file to be created first. After that the CGI file has to be called.

}

This is the idea, I hope someone can help.

Thanks already,

Michael

Anon

You can call an external process which does the post to the CGI.

Apparently you don't own the CGI. You can use a program like Curl called with an exec function to do the request and get the return status from the cgi.
Like this you could do SSL requests.

$output=exec("curl $addr");

Look at the column from Matt Allen

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/matt20000305.php3?&print_mode=1

Hth

JBL

Anon

JB,

I have looked at the column but I don't think it's what I need.

I've got a form which has the same idea as this one:

Now there would usually be a submit button but I just want it to post it without having to press one.

I hope I'm a bit more clearer this time.

Thanks.

Anon

I don't think PHP provides a function for this, but you could write one using fsockopen() to port 80 on the remote machine.

You will need to read the HTTP documentation (at www.w3c.org) on how to properly format a POST connection -- as I recall, you have to pass the destination Web server a properly formed HTTP request header that contains the size of the POST data, followed by a bytestream containing the POST data.

If you want to do something with the remote CGI's output, it's slightly more complicated; you would need to read/save the response and strip off the HTTP header (since you are not using a PHP function that handles that for you).

All of this presupposes that you really need to use POST and not GET. If you can use GET, it's much simpler -- just fopen a connection to http://whatever/path?yourvariable=yourdata and get the response.