Is it possible to use the output of Matt's Archives FormMail as input to DBMan? If not, is it possible to write a script which inputs to both?

Either would be a real Godsend.

We have an online school where the students, among other things, keep a journal. The journal entries are e-mailed to both a list and an instructor. The instructor has to comment upon and grade the journal entries.

Right now the original journal entries are created via a virtual form (javascript) and e-mailed using FormMail. The instructor's work is done as a reply to the e-mail.
This cries out for a database, but really needs the mail capabilities as well.

Can we have both? Pretty please! :-)

Thanks.

Hi Warmfire,

Everything is possible (specially using dbman) although your stuff sounds like a big project to me. You might want to consider the following option though.

Instead of doing all this mailing stuff, you can set up dbman with a couple of fields, one of them being a Journal_Entry and another one being Journal_Reply.

The student will enter his journal report in the Journal_Entry field and the instructor would answer in the Journal_Reply field so every journal would be an entry in your database. You can use mailing for notifying the relevant people of any changes in the record. The advantage of doing it this way is that dbman is an almost perfect match for your needs. Students will log into your website and add/view/modify/search on their records. You can have your cake and eat it too :-)

There will be a few modifications you will have to make to dbman but it is perfectly possible.

Let us know what you decide.

Cheers
-JO

I will really have to think about this. If I understand, this is essentially the way this system (the forum BBS) works. Basically I get a message that I got a message.

The school did this with Delphi for a while but found the students didn't very respond well. I suspect it is because there is an immediacy to e-mail that is lost when a second level is added.

But I will think on it, tho my immediate reaction is the the more complex way might be better. But let me think on it.

Thanks for you reply and ideas.

Hi,

You can put whatever you want on the e-mail. It doesn´t have to be just a mail telling the student that he had a response. It can be the Journal entry and the response too.

The only requirement is that any new activity to the Journal needs to be done in dbman so that a record of the changes is kept.

cheers
-JO

OK, this works for me. The students don't need to ever view the file, let alone modify or search on it, if they can add a journal entry (add a record) and distribute it via e-mail. As long as the instructor can modify the record and have that distributed via e-mail as well, it all hangs together.

I guess the next step is getting to the nitty gritty.

I still have some basic work to do in students.pl first. Mostly writing a bunch of if statements such that select, checkbox and textarea files have admin view and access only in add a record. I found some instructions for doing this buried in the forum and printed them out, so I will get on it and see if I can get that much to work.

Thanks for clarifying the options. I really needed the input before making a decision.