Using web events to do dialoguing

My last post was about using an HTML form with KRL to get data from a page and submit it back to the server. This post describes another method for doing the same thing, but this method is less vulnerable to interference from other code on the site.

I’m writing an application that runs on Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook munges HTML forms somehow, making it impossible to do dialoguing the way I explained last week. This new method does not depend on the behavior of HTML forms, so it works great even on a JavaScript-heavy site like Facebook.

Here’s the process:

In my application, I’m asking the user for a first and last name to search the BYU directory. I put an HTML form on the page to collect that information. Then there is a JavaScript function that runs when the user clicks the “Search” button. That function pulls the data out of the form and raises an event with that data to my ruleset. Here’s how that part looks:

(You’ll also notice that I’m setting the page_params.kynetx_app_version to be “dev”. This is due to the way I structured my application; I need that so that I don’t have to deploy the ruleset every time. You probably won’t need to do this, but read more here if you’re interested anyway.)

The rule that handles the event is very straightforward. Here’s what it looks like:

The function listnames() is defined in the global block, but it’s not really relevant to this discussion.