Re: FN-FORUM Help with forms on a CD-ROM

date posted 12th April 2001 10:58

On Thursday 12 April 2001 09:38, Andy wrote:

> A client of ours wanted (they don't anymore!)


Tsch! Bloody clients *:)


> to distribute a CD-ROM with HTML pages which the user could view in their
> browser. They also wanted to add a search facility from within the HTML
> form that called a CGI (or VB exe) to search an Access database.

There are two ways I can see of doing it off the top of my head.

One, go with a Java search engine. O'Reilly has a nice little system on their
Perl Bookshelf CD set. Not sure the exact setup for it, Java is not something
that I've looked at in any great detail, but it was basically a little applet
that they embedded in their HTML page that could do searches across the
CD-ROMs or the HTML pages on your HD. Might be some info on their site
(http://www.oreilly.com)

It's good cross platform solution, one of the drawbacks is that you needed to
install a JavaVM for it to work. But you could supply that on the CD. You'd
also need a pretty decent Java programmer.

The other way, and the one I would recommend (because it's the one I have the
most experience with), is using Director. There are literally thousands of
Xtras (plugins that extend Directors functionality) out there for searching,
accessing different file types, and I'm sure I've seen one to access MDB
files. Write yourself either a stand alone exe or embed a Shockwave file in
your HTML page and use that to perform the search on either the files on the
CD, or any files you install on the HD.

Configuration wise I'd guess that the Director solution will be more flexible
from a U.I. point of view (although I'm open to education on this point),
plus you wouldn't need to install any extra software if you went for the
executable option.

Could be quite tricky to write though, depending on the functionality
required.

Any particular reason why it was an Access database? How many records are we
talking about? I'd would agree with Dave that XML would be a more flexible
(and 'open') solution.

If you want to go into any more detail just holler.

G.