Re: How to get PHP to do a POST??

Patrick Calkins pressed the little lettered thingies in this order... > Hello all! > Here is an interesting problem that I can not solve, maybe one of you > know?? Here is what I'm trying to do. I sell a lot of items on eBay, and > lots of people ask me for a quote on shipping. We ship via UPS and I go to > their site a lot to lookup rates. I decided to make my own web page that > links into UPS' with most of the fields already pre-set, and all I want to > do is give the user back a total for shipping. I need to manipulate what > comes back from UPS first, so I can add to the shipping price to cover > materials, etc, then give the final numbers back to the end user. This is > where I have a problem. I was able to have my page act as a user-agent, and > do the submit itself, however on UPS's site, their submit button is not a > button, but rather an image. Since a button is easy to know what values are > getting set (ie name="Submit" value="getinfo"), I did not know what vars > the image-submit was setting, since there was no 'value' variable, only a > 'name' variable. I tried it on my own server and found that php assigns the > values 'name_x' and 'name_y' giving us the x&y values of where the user > clicked, but UPS does not use PHP, so I don't know what their software sets > the submit values to hence it does not work correctly. Their form just > thinks something went wrong and displays the beginning again. If I just > include their submit button on my form, then all works fine, except for the > fact that I can't intercept the data comming back from UPS so that I can > adjust the prices. Any idea on how to do this??? > You can (and should) sign up for a developer's account with UPS so that you can get access to their online tools. With their documentation about their online tools and a basic knowledge of PHP's sockets (i.e. fsockopen()), you will be able to connect directly to the page on their web site that processes shipping costs and have a PHP socket bring the results back to your web browser. This elimnates the need to simulate a button click. I have done this, but I am not yet at liberty to release the code to the public domain. It isn't difficult if you know how to use sockets. Christopher Ostmo a.k.a. tech@AppIdeas.com AppIdeas.com Meeting cutting edge dynamic web site needs For a good time, http://www.AppIdeas.com/