Re: XP: Doing Things Right

Paul,

First: this is pretty complex as you have laid it out, no wonder you are
looking for suggestions !

Second: please think of this message as Fuzzy thinking out loud. It may or
may not be any help at all, obviously, I'm hoping it will.

My first thought: Does he need to "reverse engineer" this?

It has been my experience that the toughest part of doing ~anything~ data
base is that before you start, you need to know what you want when you are
all done.

I get a couple of potential clues for solution from your mentioning "their"
cgi-bin, and that "they take the data and parse it into pages" (pardon the
paraphrase).

This tells me that the folks doing the data processing are sophisticated
enough to speak Perl or one of the c's. This is important. Secondly, one of
the things I do know about "MS products" is that they love tab or coma
delimited files. Import - export. No problems Mate (to borrow a phrase).

So . . . 

May be this is over simplified but . . . 

It seems to me like you need one thing for sure and possibly two. First and
foremost: *A meeting with the "third party" folks who are processing the
data.*

Heck, I can barely ask for food and fuel in Perl, and *I* could write a
script that can format and output a HTML file any dog gone way you want it.

See what I'm thinking? Thought so. Here's the "may be two" thing you need:
cgiemail This is an exceptionally powerful tool ! Thinking it only 'sends
form results to e-mail' is like thinking the Starship Enterprise is just
another boat.

One  of the things cgiemail likes to do the most, is send delimited text
files to an address (yes, even directly to an IP address).

See what I'm thinking?

I'm beginning to think you should have been hired as a consultant on this
one Paul. Because you are not going to have to do much code writing by the
looks of it from this prospective. All you need is a Perl script that is
well written (don't forget to have it check for duplicates in records) and
a server based application (cgiemail) the data gathering folks already
(obviously) have the box to run. 

You create the forms for data input in HTML, the user and the server do the
rest. Cool.

Again, just some thoughts from a Fuzzy prospective.

HTH,
Fuzzy


At 10:26 AM 7/18/00 -0400, Villano, Paul wrote:
>Forgive the cross-post.  I'm trying to get a wide opinion from as many HTML
>gurus as possible because this is a philosophical question. 
[ . . .]
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