Snarl & Google Forms

[Kyle]

I trying to develop a check-in system for a small department at my
university. I would like to use google forms to input the data and
record it; however, I also need to build a notification system to
notify staff of arrivals. I would like to know if anyone could help
me find a way to get snarl to interface with google forms. thanks

[Sven Walther]

Hi Kyle,

you can be sure to get my help as much as needed for the Snarl part of
your system - just give me (and the other readers ;)) some more ideas
how the concept of your system shall be. Having search for Google Forms
I get the explanation of Google Docs - so how do you want to make your
setup...?

:)

[Kyle]

Yes, you are correct. Google forms is a part of Google documents.
Basically, the idea is that we have a form that we created with name,
id number, and reason for visit. It also has the name of the staff
member to be seen. My goal is to have a snarl notification pop up on
the staff member's computers notifying them of the arrival as soon as
the user submits the data. Currently Google Docs, will let you notify
via email; however, the staff doesn't want their email boxes to fill
up with 50-100 emails a day for all the walk in visits. I've toyed
with just writing a program in say VB or PHP, but the Google Forms are
easy for the staff to modify in the future, when our team is not
longer around. If you need more specific information or a sample of
the form, please let me know. I appreciate your help (our team is a
bunch of newbs at programming).

[Jvonfange]

We are also working on a similar development project. Sven, do you
have any further ideas?

[Sven Walther]

Sorry for the late answer - some trouble at work...

So my main question is how we can initiatiate something out of Google
Forms. I already learned that you can send emails (which could be a
first idea to fetch them automatically). If we can initiatae out of
Google Forms some JavaScript this could be the way.

Are there any documentations where I can read a little bit how I can get
in touch with Google Forms programmatically?

[Max Battcher]

Because I'm somewhat bored of this topic already I decided to take the
five minutes to research this project... (By the way, it doesn't
exactly sound like the best way to solve these problems, but they
aren't my problems to solve, so whatever.)

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Sven Walther <pidgi...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry for the late answer - some trouble at work...
>
> So my main question is how we can initiatiate something out of Google
> Forms. I already learned that you can send emails (which could be a
> first idea to fetch them automatically). If we can initiatae out of
> Google Forms some JavaScript this could be the way.
>
> Are there any documentations where I can read a little bit how I can get
> in touch with Google Forms programmatically?

You can't edit the Google Forms as they are hosted at Google Docs
(beyond the choice of one of several themes that they allow). If you
want to customize the form it seems the way that many do this (because
these forms are your average web forms, just that they post to a
handler at Google Docs) is to finish a form, and the View Source to
copy and paste the HTML, at which point you can edit it to your
heart's content; you just have to host the edited form somewhere else
that allows arbitrary HTML (Google Sites is one example) and you have
to re-do this anytime the form needs to be changed.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/customize-google-docs-forms.html

It shouldn't be too hard to integrate the code on submit for something
like Yip to get Snarl notifications.

http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/introducing-yip-an-unified-notification-system-for-the-web/

Of course, that doesn't do actually do you any good because those
notifications will go only to the Firefox browser that the form is
being submitted FROM (assuming they bother to install Yip)... What you
really want is the server side to notify you (where things are being
submitted TO), which means changing the handler that the form posts to
and rather than doing some weird proxying logic to push things back to
Google Docs you are best off learning a real web framework like Django
or RoR and serving the whole thing yourself.

(What I would personally do, most likely, would be to build it as a
Google App Engine app. The benefit there is that you get Google's XMPP
stack to easily do IM-based notifications...)

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/