pre-populating pages

[rex johnson]

Is it possible to link to a site and prepopulate fields on their home page without passing parameters.
Our website is linking to a business partner's website and would like to pass information to their home page and prepopulate certain fields.
They cannot allocate resource to amend their site to accept parameters.
I don't think that it is possible but have been asked to investigate

[Bear Bibeault]

Without hooks on their site to enable this you are indeed out of luck.

[Scott Dunbar]

The only way I can think of to do this involves a good amount of work. You would have to have a very good understanding of the content on their site and "re-present" it. Basically a back end process would read their site, parse it, and then show the content to the browser with the fields pre-populated.

This isn't pretty and even slight changes to your partners site could cause problems, depending on the complexity of the site and the data involved.

Depending on the business relationship, perhaps you can host your own page and submit the form to your partner. That way you control all of the GUI and you and your partner only have to agree on the parameters in the form.

[Bear Bibeault]

Depending on the business relationship, perhaps you can host your own page and submit the form to your partner.

This is what I've had to do in the past when the partner was unwilling to commit any time to the partnership. (That's some "partner" that can't devote the 30 minutes or so it would take to put the necessary hooks into a page to allow pre-populating of the fields).

[Bear Bibeault]

That also assumes that partner's app security is faulty, allowing forms to be submitted from sites other than their own. But I'd be willing to bet that they haven't devoted much time to that either.
[ October 07, 2004: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]