"Jeff Caspari" wrote:

No one in the MV world might be offering but this isn't an MV problem.
If you ask for solutions in forums where people specialize in JS,
Flash, Silverlight, or Java, then you're sure to get offers.

Best as always,
T

On Oct 6, 9:14*am, "Jeff Caspari" <mu... (AT) idt (DOT) net> wrote:
I'm late to the party on this one, but curious how you are writing a
file to local disk from a web page. Perhaps I am not understanding and
you are not doing this from a web page? Within a browser without
extensions, I am unaware of being able to either read or write files
directly, without user intervention, other than cookies.

You can have the user upload a file. With html5, for example, you can
do <input type="file" ... but the user then browses to find a file to
upload. Otherwise it would be a security breach for a typical web
browser to initiate grabbing some file from your local system, right?

There might be some stuff you can do if you narrow your browser
selection down to just IE and/or your OS down to just Windows, I don't
know. But for a general use web page to read a local file, I think you
will need the user to select the file, such as with an html 5 doctype
and the <input type="file"... approach, then some javascript to read
the values from the file and backing the form with the data. I don't
know if that helps, but a big issue here is that browsers have strict
requirements for NOT grabbing files on your local machine for security
reasons. --dawn

Hi Dawn,

There is already a program (an executable supplied by the EMR vendor) that
exists on the client's workstation (really network) that we can execute
using a local vbscript that will create a file (also local) with patient
demographics. So all of this is done locally. The vbscript is invoked
using a hotkey sequence at the workstation.

So when the user is filling out our web form (not local) they press the
hotkey, enter a patient id, and then a file is produced with the patient
demographics.

Now the whole problem is how to get that data, parse it, and place it onto
the web form, in specific fields.

I am very happy to say that our brilliant and tireless programmers have
figured out a way in the vbscript to read that data and place it on the
form. Most of that problem was how to figure out, in the vbscript, how to
address the specific web page. It kept opening up a new web page.

So this problem is solved. It was very tricky.

Thanks everyone and surely there are many ways to solve this and I'm sure
our solution is not the most elegant. We'll see if it holds up in
production.
Jeff

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

On Oct 6, 9:14 am, "Jeff Caspari" <mu... (AT) idt (DOT) net> wrote:
I'm late to the party on this one, but curious how you are writing a
file to local disk from a web page. Perhaps I am not understanding and
you are not doing this from a web page? Within a browser without
extensions, I am unaware of being able to either read or write files
directly, without user intervention, other than cookies.

You can have the user upload a file. With html5, for example, you can
do <input type="file" ... but the user then browses to find a file to
upload. Otherwise it would be a security breach for a typical web
browser to initiate grabbing some file from your local system, right?

There might be some stuff you can do if you narrow your browser
selection down to just IE and/or your OS down to just Windows, I don't
know. But for a general use web page to read a local file, I think you
will need the user to select the file, such as with an html 5 doctype
and the <input type="file"... approach, then some javascript to read
the values from the file and backing the form with the data. I don't
know if that helps, but a big issue here is that browsers have strict
requirements for NOT grabbing files on your local machine for security
reasons. --dawn

Jeff,

Have you looked into my product? PavukIDF creates the web forms from
MV data and handles all of the I/O and database operations for you. It
lets you stay in the MV programming space without needing to learn all
things web.

I wrote an entire EMR/PMS for clinical use in 1.5 years using it. The
security and audit components have been addressed.

The very reason that I conceived Pavuk many years ago was the amount
of labor needed to create web forms, then create all of the scripting
to link them into the MV system as a "back end". Add on top of that,
security concerns. I reversed the approach and said, what if the MV
side could create the forms for me. What if modifying a form was just
moving a control in a database record.

You can read up on PavukIDF at www.pavuk.com. There is also the PDF of
the article in the Sep/Oct Spectrum (also available on their web site)
and the Linux installation guide to give you an idea of what it takes
to install it and get it running. Much less than setting up LAMP. I
also offer a free sandbox account on my server where you can try it
out.

I hope that, between PavukIDF and DesignBais and other products, we
may someday all recycle our Wyse-50 terminals into something useful.

Bill

Hi Bill,

We are really happy with DesignBais but I am so glad there are alternatives
and I wish you much success.

Actually, I am more interested in your EMR/PMS since we occasionally are in
the position to recommend one which we utimately would interface to.
Are you still selling it and do you have information on it?

Thanks,
Jeff

"Bill Crowell" <bcrowell (AT) pavuk (DOT) com> wrote