Fill in someone else's web form from FM?

[CliffS]

Can you fill in someone else's web forms from Filemaker?

I have an invoices table; each record has a customer's name, address, city, state, zip.

I want to transfer those fields into the web pages of UPS online shipping (or Fedex.com, etc). For example, how do I move fields from FM to this webpage http://wwwapps.ups.com/calTimeCost?loc=en_US and then capture the response back to Filemaker?

Right now, I do this crazyness:

1) In FM, copy the fields to a text file

2) From FM, start a Windows Script Handler script

3) From WSH script, parse that text file

4) From WSH, feed the fields into a browser-based macro playback system (iOpus Internet Macros)

5) From Internet Macros, log into the website and fill in the web fields

6) From the Internet Macros, capture the web returns

7) From the Internet Macros, write the web returns to a text file

8) Exit Internet Macros, return to the WSH script

9) From WSH, start a FM script and exit WSH script.

10) Within that FM script parse the text that the website returned

11) Write the text into approprate Filemaker fields.

WHEW! This works, but is difficult to understand, and hard to maintain.

I've tried the FM "Send DDE Execute" script step, but I can't figure out how to successively log into an account, set browser fields, then capture output to FM.

MANY THANKS!

-Cliff

[Reed]

Perhaps the troi url plugin would do the trick....

http://www.troi.com/software/urlplugin.html

Dana

[Garry Claridge]

I guess you are using Instant Web Publishing (IWP) with FM7? If not, you can do it with Custom Web Publishing (CWP).

All the best.

Garry