Is there a way to store form contents directly into a MySQL table?

SpreadsheetConverter generates a standard web form. When the user presses submit, the data is posted to the web page of your choice.

You will have to create a simple PHP page that parses the parameters and creates an SQL Insert statement and runs it against your database.

This type of code is very simple and described in all standard PHP books.

If you search the web for “php save post data to mysql” or “how to store form data in database using php”, you will find a lot of discussions on how to do this, e.g.

• ​https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13181733/submitting-a-form-using-php-to-store-information-in-a-database
• ​https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3338138/insert-all-post-data-into-mysql-using-php

How do I pre-populate input fields with data retrieved from a database?

There are several solution. For example, you can send them over an URL with the syntax http://www.foo.com/calc.htm?bar=56 will set the field call bar to 56. You name cells in Excel.

This assumes that you are prefilling an input cell. Here is a better solution that can be used to set any value.

If you know ASP, the simplest solution is to take the HTML page, make it into a ASP-page over replace statements like

p1A1 = 1234

with

p1A1 = <%= reference to variable which contains the value for cell A1 on sheet 1 %>

where 1234 is the default value that you set in Excel and which you want to read from the database instead.

This solution also works for PHP.

If you want to set constants, see How to initialize values on the server to initialize values on the server

I want PHP to save the resulting order configuration to MySQL using PHP.

SpreadsheetConverter creates a standard webform, you can either convert it into an php-file or just set the action of the post to php-script that takes all the parameters and saves them into a database.

If you name the input cells and calculated cells in Excel, then these names will be used in the web form.

I use PHP to receive the submitted data, but it cannot handle Unicode UTF-8.

After reading

http://us2.php.net/mbstring

it seems that if you want PHP to handle UTF-8, some work is required.

An alternative is to let SpreadsheetConverter generate an UTF-8 file and then convert it into a suitable encoding. You find iconv.exe in the directory where SpreadsheetConverter is installed.

iconv.exe -t windows-1252 -f utf-8 old.htm > new.htm

and then change

the row <meta content=”text/html;charset=utf-8″ http-equiv=”Content-Type”>

to <meta content=”text/html;charset=windows-1252″ http-equiv=”Content-Type”>

How to I set a constant used by the calculator programmatically?

If you have created a calculator, and there are some constants you want to set, for example the current rate, then read the following:

How to initialize values on the server