If your users are using Windows, then something like
http://www.hypervisual.com/winbinder/
might be good on the user side, as you can bundle the PHP binary and
everything else needed into one executable (with some work of course)
And then they can create a file formatted to your specifications to
upload sometime later.
Or you can use some other UI like QT to create the XML document on the
client side which would be cross-platform.
The only way to re-use what you have in an offline web environment would
be like Jay said to install the required software on the client's /
user's computers, and is that really something that is maintainable?
The key question: is the additional work required really beneficial?
Jay Blanchard wrote:
[snip]
Apologies if this is the wrong place for this question, but I'm sure
there
are some experts out there who might be able to point me in the right
direction... :)
I'm doing some work at the moment where remote teams can submit reports
through to our database when connected over the internet to our server.
However, I've been asked to look in the possibility of the teams
completing
the form offline, and uploading when they have access to a connection.
It looks like I might be able offer something like Microsoft InfoPath
forms
(better recommendations?) to generate an XML file, and then use a PHP
file
to upload the file into the database. Additionally, I could also do with
this process uploading a number of other files (e.g. images, text files)
to
the server.
Does anyone have any experience in this area, and would be able to
recommend
a solution?
[/snip]
The first part: completing a web-based form offline would mean having
some way to process the result 'locally', so how would you do that? You
don't want to install copies of Apache & PHP on each machine and have
those services run each time the machine starts, so how would you get a
form to save the necessary data client side? I searched offline forms on
Google and came up with several third party solutions, YMMV.
The second part: making the network aware that a machine has connected
to it and performing the proper steps or make the machine aware that it
has connected to the network and have it initiate the process. Of course
this could be taken care of by the user by having them click something.
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