Passing input value in URL

[b1ackcat]

Hello Coding!

So I have a website that I'd like to point to in an app I'm writing. I'd like to pass it a value from my app, but the site, to my knowledge, has no API and I would just be hard-linking to the page. There's a text field on this page that I would like to populate using my link, similar to how you can set variables using php with ?field=xxx

Is there a way to just do this with the URL if I know the ID of the textbox (from the page source)?

[Xanthir]

No. The url query (the part after the ?) is just data made available to the server and the page. It doesn't have any effect by itself.

[b1ackcat]

Bah. Makes sense. Alright, I'll contact the site admin to see if there's some interface I can use. Thanks.

[Steax]

I'm pretty sure you could also embed the page in an iframe and use javascript to populate the input field.

[You, sir, name?]

You can pass this information to the web browser using the URL hash tag.

Something like

http://www.example.com/foobar/#field=data

And then use javascript to grab the information and insert it in the field. Probably easiest to use jQuery or some such to get it done.

[Xanthir]

There is no difference (to javascript) between passing it in the query or passing it in the hash. Both are available from javascript.

However, b1ackcat doesn't have access to the page's source, and so can't add code to deal with that information.

[You, sir, name?]

While both are available, it's bad practice to send message to the client via the query unless you also intend for the server to receive the message. The Bad Thing that may happen when ignoring this separation is that the server may or may not in the future start reacting to this query variable.