External Forms - working around the stdin

Is there a way to trick the form processor?

[Miki]

One of the sites I work on is a reseller for a Mother company, which provides a form processor for its resellers.

Currently, there is an HTML form on my site which submits to the Mother site's form processor. However, when the form is submitted, the user is taken to the Mother site.

I'd like to use the query string to take a screen scrape of the Mother site's output, then style the output according to my site. But the form processor appears to take values only through the STDIN.

Is there a way to trick the form processor, or to submit form input without taking the user to the Mother site?

[Slade]

My guess is the best you could do is wrap it in a frame. As long as they don't break out of them, it should let your browser stay where it is. The most interesting part will be what the user is supposed to do once he is finished.

[grahamstewart]

Pass the form data onto your own PHP script and then have that script make the call to the 'mother' site. parse the reply and then present it.

[Miki]

I considered using a frame with zero width/height, so I could prevent the user from viewing the Mother site's branding. But how can I tell when the Mother site's output page has finished loading so I can return a confirmation of success? (estimate 99% of cases will be successful, btw)

grahamstewart - That would work awesomely, but how could I get a PHP script to do that? Unfortunately, I don't have PHP at my disposal for this site (the site uses DTML/Zope + Python), but I'm sure any pointers for getting it to work in PHP could be translated into Zope somehow.

Thanks so much for the fast replies, both of you! :D

[Slade]

See if "curl" is available to you.

[Miki]

Thanks. :) Couldn't find anything easily. Wish Python was as easy as PHP. :(

I am trying the frames solution now, though. Will keep you posted if I find a solution.