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PipeDream - Use to update a www site booking form.

One of Pipedream's features is that it can read and write any file. It is quite happy writing to a text file or to an html file.

One feature of html is that the TAB character is treated as white space. So a PipeDream file that is full of TABs is no problem to a browser - they are simply ignored. In fact if you look at other sites html offerings, these are regularly peppered with more TABs and spaces that you would believe. Silly really as these must be computer generate sites!

There is also a feature in most www servers called SSI - Server Side Includes. You can tell the www server to include another file in the www page it outputs to the client.

These three facts make for a very useful way of keeping www tables, such as time tables, price lists, booking lists etc., up to date using PipeDream. Since most servers are unix-based, the included file does not have to be of any particular type, but of course it must be html internally.

As an example, I offer the files and www pages that we have used to keep holiday cottage bookings current is included.

To see how this all works you will need to download the zip file containing

• BookingsThis - a PipeDream file. There was also a BookingsNext so rotation at years end was facilitated.
• c_bookThis - the custom function sheet to operate the system.
• FormThis - the main www page for public viewing.
• +this.inc - This is the file to be Server-Side-Included in the above.
• FormThisFull - the public form does not give visitors names. However we thought our cleaner should be aware of names and when booking was a visitor and when it was family, so this is a private form that was not on public view.
• +thisfull.inc - the SSI for the above.

These files are here included in one directory but, of course, with PipeDream's referencing ability only the last 4 need to be in the local www site source: the first two can be elsewhere.

Working versions of the two FormThis pages are also on site, so you can see how the www server dishes them out with the included files in place:

• FormThis.html
• FormThisFull.html

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