Locally saving intermediate data

[skiflyer]

Ok please don't get me started on the oddness of what I'm doing, it's just the way it has to be.

I have a series of forms, for which I need to let the user at any point say... I need a smoke, save my current progress, I'll come back later. Unfortunately the requirement is such that it is saved on the users machine... the data is too sensitive for the server to hold.

My thinking is I'll just serialize my session to file, serve up the file, and then erase it.

Fine great, but then I'll need to supply an upload file form later, which really just seems silly to me. I would like to think I can save the serialized data in such a fashion that when they click that .html or .hta(thinking of other possibilities) it will automagically take them to a given page (back on the server) and supply the serialized data. Does anyone have any ideas how I might accomplish this? Perhaps I should be posting in the plain HTML topic, because what I guess I'm asking is for a way to have a local HTML file submit some pre-stored $_POST data.

Thanks for any ideas.

-Rob

 

[BitFuzzy]

The easiest way would be to setup a couple of scripts to work with mysql (or any dbms for that matter)

The user could click on <take break> which would save the current form data to the dbms. When the user returns, he logs back in and clicks <continue> which would call the data back to the form deleting the data from the dbms.

As a secondary precausion, you could have a simple perl script run say every 15 min by setting it up as a cron job (time allowed for a break etc). Read the timestamps of saved form data, from there any data older than 30 min. gets deleted.

 

[skiflyer]

Yes, I completely agree. Not an option however.

 

[sleipnir214]

You're going to have to put more intelligence in the user interface.

This sounds to me like a perfect application for some kind of special-purpose frontent to a web service.

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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[jstreich]

I realize that you see how silly the idea is.... Thinks... The user has to agree to have it saved on his machine unless you make it a cookie. But then other sites he visits will be able to see &quot;I'm out for a smoke&quot;.... which won't matter unless the site was built to look especially for this sort of thing.

You could always use a cypher(spelling) and store it server side encoded...

 

[skiflyer]

That was my original (declined idea), but when re-pitched it's now gone through. So I'm going to go ahead and encrypt the serialized data on the server...

Thanks for the ideas, hopefully I won't have to worry about it later.

-Rob