I looked but couldn't find a sub-forum for topics relating to cgi-bins, so I figured I'd put this here.

Lets say I create a form for people to fill out, and I tell it to submit it to the cgi-bin that is a part of my free hosting package. When I receive the information, is there some way that I could have it put into a spreadsheet, say Excel, so that I could view it easily? I'm designing a website for my youth pastor, and it would make things much more simple if he could receive info (such as registration for conferences and retreats) in a spreadsheet format. I'm curious if there is a way to do this (outside of editing the cgi-bin itself).

This relates to the hosting somewhat, because I want to know not only if it can be done, but if the cgi-bin that I have access to as a part of my free hosting is capable of somehow handling this... Thanks.

cgi scripts can do this, php scripts can do this, if you don't mind php scripts for it, will work the same.

I will write a script to do it, but won't be ready for at least a week, additional ideas is the ability to convert to database as well, but will work on the spreadsheet (all types of spreadsheets, not just excel format) way first.

It will be open source too, so you will be free to modify it how you want.

Cheers,


MC

thanks mc, i appreciate it.

Hey sirgalphan,

It's coming along nicely but I need to ask you some questions of what you will be using in your form, e.g. the input types. If you could point me to a link of the form currently in use, that would be great.

So far I've tested it with text, textarea, checkbox, selectbox and I am wondering whether you would use any other form types like radio, image etc, I will test these eventually but I thought the latter were more important as these other types I rarely use, I will look into multi-selectbox, multi-checkbox, etc as well.

I also need to understand how you would want this spreadsheet, either stored on your own web server, emailed to someone, etc. Those are basically the ideas I have, basically what it'll do is it'll write it onto your web server, then send it off as an attachment to a specified email address, but if you just want to store it on your server, then I can just do that.

I also need to know whether you'll be reusing this same spreadsheet over or if you would be using different spreadsheets per form submission, I thought just appending (adding) to the file would be better but eventually the filesize would be too large for sending.

Cheers,


MC

the form i had in mind (havent worked on it lately) just has text areas and a submit button. if you could make it so it could be emailed (as an attachment perhaps) that would be awesome. and different spreadsheet per form is what i had in mind. thx.

Yes, I also agree to have a place to discuss and share the knowledge of CGI.
I can help on it, even I may not be very good and still I am still learning on it.

Actually I am also experimenting different ways on the CGI, like we don't need
to follow the traditional format or adding encode/decode on the string following
the URL address.

If i made a form with CGI i would make the CGI send the Form with the info to my email, its much easier if u want that u can download a thing called
TOTMAIL 3.6a or another versions the problem is that its in spanish O.o
When that CGI send the info to ur EMAIL its easy to see, but ur web hosting needs a SMTP server or SENDMAIL path
If your webhost server is UNIX u can use both, SMTP and SENDMAIL
If your webhost server is WINDOWS u can only use SENDMAIL
XD thats another way u can get the info from a form Bye ^^