Dave
Staff
/ Moderator
Jun 19, 2002, 5:58 PM
Post #2 of 3
(4152 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [gfweb] Appointment to view a listing form
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Hi gfweb!
I'm sure if I understand exactly what you're trying to do, but let me give it a shot anyways. : )
Realty Manager lets you pass data from the listings pages to just about any other program. Usually through a direct link or through a web form.
You'll need a separate program to power your "appointment to view" form. It may be a simple email form, or something more advanced. The key thing is that that program accepts form input and allows you to pre-populate fields by passing that data in a link or form submission.
Your program will be coded to accept specific field names for form input, what you'll do is have realty manager create a link (or form) that passes the field names your program expects and the values from the realty manager listing.
For example, to link to yahoo maps from the listings page we send the user to an URL something like this (i've shortened it for the example):
http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?addr=$lfield1_ue$
This loads yahoo maps page and sends the address from "listing field 1" as "addr", a field name that the yahoo program is expecting. The yahoo program doesn't care whether that information came from a form submission on it's own site, or a link from a realty manager listings page, so it just happily displays the map.
If you had an email form right on the page that you wanted to have the user fill out to email the listings owner AND you had a custom field setup for the listings owner email address, you might have a hidden field as part of the form like this:
<input type="hidden" name="email_to" value="$lfield33$">
For what you want to do (pop open a new window and send some values to an existing form) you probably want a link like this:
<a href="http://www.myrealtywebsite.com/showing_date.htm?address=$lfield1_ue$&city=$lfield2_ue$" target="_blank">setup appointment</a>
When the user clicks that link from the publishing listing page, it should open a new window (because of the target="_blank") to your url and pass the listing fields specified. The key is having a program on the other end that can receive the "address" and "city" field names and values and populate them in a form for you.
One last comment, you may have noticed that for some of the placeholders I added _ue. This uses a version of the placeholder that is "URL Encoded". Browsers and servers sometimes don't like things like spaces or other characters in URLs, so they encode them like this "%20". You'll sometimes see this in the address bar when you do a search. It basically just makes sure everything gets passed correctly when you are adding data to a link.
Hope that helps, let me know if that does the trick, or there is anything else I can help with!
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
|
Re: [Dave] Appointment to view a listing form
[