Splitting HTML View

[Freddie]

Hi,

I have a problem that may have been resolved.

Let me start by saying that I am an html n00b.

I am developing a Point of Sale System running on SAP. THe front end is html and jscript based.

The hardware that I am deploying on, is a dual monitor system, running windows OS.

What I really want to do is to have one view for the cashier, and one view for the customer, e.g. the cashier has the calculator and system buttons etc on their screen, the customer only sees the line items that have been scanned.

My thnking is to probably have two HTML pages, one to display on each screen, with the cashiers html page passing data to the customers html page and which is updated in realtime.

Any suggestions? Am I approaching this problem correctly?

Please assist.

Thanks.

[bluewalrus]

HTML can't do this by itself. You could do it with PHP, some other server side language, or maybe javascript.

[djr33]

You could have two different pages, but as bluewalrus says HTML can't do anything (like saving data), so that won't really accomplish much.

You could use Javascript or something else to send the data back and forth, possibly.

I'm not sure of the best way to approach this, but I think you should look at the bigger picture. For one thing, why are you using webpages for something that is much more suited for another programming language? It may be possible, but it seems awkward.

You could attempt this like a chatroom (where the items are the messages), except that only the cashier sends (and the customer just watches). But that requires a database, a serverside language (like PHP), AND Javascript.

Whatever way you do this, it won't be easy and, to be honest, you need to have a bigger background in this sort of thing to really attempt it. I'm sure you can learn this given the time, but it won't be fast so if you need this soon, it's probably a good idea to hire someone or look at another method that might be easier. I'm sure there's some software commercially available that can do this.


The chatroom idea above is an interesting one and it might be a cool puzzle to work out, but still won't be too easy. You might be able to avoid using a server and just use Javascript, since this system will only need to work in a specific environment.



Also, if you want you could use a single page that is processed by either a serverside language or Javascript that would then display different things in the two windows (using "if" statements), but I don't know if that would help in this case.