Advice on automating tasks...

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dubfire

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Apr 8, 2007
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I would like some advice from the coders in the forum. I would like to add a form to one of my financial sites, let's say insurance for example.

When the user fills in the form, all the different insurance provider sites are checked and then the results are returned to my site - much like confused.com.

I don't want to directly copy confused.com, but do something similar for another area of finance.

I am a beginner php coder, and would love to know how any of you would achieve this. Would you use PHP? how much would I expect to pay someone to setup this form for me?

Do these forms actually pull the info from the insurance providers database, or do they fill the forms in like a human would?

I'm sure this info would be helpful to a lot of people on the site so any answers would be appreciated. i don't expect anyone to write the script, just point me in the right direction (Or give me a price for you to do the script!).


Thanks
 


The provider sites would have to provide you with an xml feed or datatype to access unless of coarse you felt like messing with coding a scraper to identify where the data is at then conforming for later changes.

Here is how you do it. Create a relationship with these companies and have them provide you with a feed, integrate it into you app by xslt template.
 
The provider sites would have to provide you with an xml feed or datatype to access unless of coarse you felt like messing with coding a scraper to identify where the data is at then conforming for later changes.

Here is how you do it. Create a relationship with these companies and have them provide you with a feed, integrate it into you app by xslt template.

This could work but if the sites your wanting the information from is free you could get a script to do it for you.

For instance if on these various other sites all you need to do is fill out your name and zip code or something into a form you could just write a script that goes out to these pages and fills in the search criteria based upon what your users filled out on your site and then return those values on your own website.

Its a bit more complicated and I'm more a web development programmer and know dick shit about PHP but a query script could work for this, I'm not sure how much you'd have to pay or who could build it for you but its a thought.
 
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