I'm currently working with the Red Cross to update/establish annual rate agreements with hotels in the area, which would allow us to shelter disaster victims and emergency response teams for a pre-arranged rate. To facilitate the processing of paperwork involved with this project, we're trying to move online the forms that the hotel manager needs to fill out. We were thinking of collecting the .FDF files and merging them into an excel spreadsheet through the appropriate Acrobat Professional 8.1 function.
While I've prepared a suitable PDF form, I'm at a loss as to how we can collect the form data. Because not all hotel managers have their email clients set up properly, we'd prefer not to set the "submit form" button to email the data. And I can't set the "submit form" button to send the data to a CGI script because, lacking a programming background, I'm not sure how to write a script that would write the data to the server.
Can anyone suggest a way for me to obtain a suitable script?
However there are some basics that are common to all server side PDF data processing.
If you have someone with a server side scripting skill, then they should be able to create a script, in what ever language it is that they use. The important bit is that the script must be aplbe to read the body content from an HTTP post, or processes query data from an HTTP Get. These are the two options available for submitting data from a PDF. It's important that the script can read the MIME type sent with the HTTP request so that it can decide on what action to take.
Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script