Mimicking Frames

[cybl]

Hey all, I am the student web-developer at my college's library and I kind have hit a snag in a current project -- here's to hoping that you all can show me the correct path to go down. =)My current project is this distance learning website; originally, when the DL librarian used forms for her page, she had to link to them externally because the actual forms had to be hosted, not on the library server, but on the main campus server (policy or some-such). Anyway, part of the re-design is to avoid externally linking because a) I don't want want to disrupt the overall flow of the website for users, and I don't want updating the DL site to be tedious, changing the same thing but in two seperate places. The only thing I could successfully implement was to have an inline frame pulling the form from the other server -- but honestly, I hate frames and I want to avoid them at all costs. I'm also not aware of any way to pull an include file from an external source, because I'm pretty certain that SSI wouldn't be able to do it and I haven't really found a successful way using PHP or javascript.What I'm hoping for from you all, is just some advice on what would be the best foot to step forward with. I'm just kind of stumped (you know, one of those: omigod, I've been looking at a computer screen for the past five hours straight and I'm beginning to think this project is burned into my retinas). Thank you so much!Cybl

[justsomeguy]

You could probably do it with PHP if you read the file and output the headers, but that would take the same amount of time for the user to download. If you want to do that though you can use file_get_contents to read the file, and send headers that would force a download. So a link on the DL server would link to a local PHP page which would read the remote file, send download headers, and then send the file contents. If you're talking about displaying the contents of the files on the page instead of linking to the file, then being able to do that would depend on the file format you're dealing with.

[cybl]

I'm not for certain if PHP will work -- my university does not and will not support PHP on the main server, however, the library does. Would this be a potential conflict or will I be able to pull just an HTML file from the other server?Thanks!

[justsomeguy]

You can just pull it from the one server, you don't need to push it from the other side. The only thing that would come into play is access control on the main server, but if you're already reading files from there then it probably isn't a problem.