Question I have an interesting little problem that may require some out of the box thinking; your help would be very much appreciated. I subscribe to a service that allows me to easily access arrest and criminal background databases online. There is a simple HTML form that allows me to plug in the name and date of birth and it will return the information. It works fine from my computer, and I set up a small webpage using that form's input names to let me do this from my cell phone. The problem is that the form method "get" points to a form action that is an https site - it requires a secure connection. My phone cannot establish a secure connection, so I need to create some sort of a gateway by which the form action would point to something on my site, and my site would then establish the secure connection, retrieve the data, and pass it back to the form so I can see it on my cell phone. I understand the concept of how this would work, but I don't know what tools I would use to create it. Can you point me in the right direction of a solution for this problem?
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Answer Hi --
You're on the right track conceptually. The idea, to recap your thoughts, is
1) phone connects to a page on your own website,
2) your website connects to the "real" back-end website,
3) back-end https website returns the data to your own server app,
4) your page parses the data and returns it to the phone.
In the ASP world there are two tools that are typically used to allow one website to connect to another and retrieve data:
I've used both of these for screen-scraping applications, they're essentially equivalent for this specific task, but have other repercussions on your server. For example, if you don't already have xml3 on your server, and don't want to upgrade components, I'd suggest asptear... while if you already have xml3 then that one works just as well and you don't need to install anything foreign.
The doc on asptear is on the same site as the download; the doc on the Microsoft component can be found by lookup on the msdn.microsoft.com website.
The subsequent parsing of the results is up to you, but it's up to you in either case, since you want to repost the stuff to the phone in your own format.
