Check if a website's form is submitting to a database - database

General question: Assuming someone has normal viewing access to a form/survey (say a google form as an example), what would be the ways to tell if the form is actually using the data you imputed and doing something with it rather than just pretending it was submitted?
I have a specific case like this where I think that I'm looking at a fake form that doesn't submit to any database, etc. but I'm not entirely sure what I would be looking for to confirm that.
I initially looked to see what the form submitted to and it goes to another html page, and I viewed the code on that page too, and it has only html and no PHP or JS. Is it still possible that it submits to a database?

You cannot know what, if anything the server will do with the submitted values unless you have access to the code running on that server.

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Google Analytics Goal Funnel Count has number differences with Production Data

I have this funnel visualization problem in Google Analytics. I have set up the funnel using the virtual pageview like so:
So basically what it tracks is that in activity page, when user clicks a button, it will show up a modal for registration and hits the /activity/virtual/open-volunteer-modal. After they fill out the forms, they click Register, and it will hits the /activity/virtual/submit-volunteer-modal.
Everything was fine, until I saw some difference in GA and Production values.
In GA, there are 3000 users that filled out the forms and submit their data. I was totally happy seeing this, but:
In Production DB, I only got 1906 users submitting their data.
I checked the code, and there is nothing wrong with it. It basically send a virtual page view when the value has been validated, so my question is how is this possible and is there any way to fix this? Or is it just intended behavior?
After further investigation, I found that some of the buttons that has open-volunteer-modal event is redirecting to submit-volunteer-modal. Hence, the submit-volunteer-modal value was bigger than the open.
Should have sipped some coffee first before working.

how to disable two way binding (security issue)

I'm facing an issue here that happens when the final user edit the HTML in the browser and change the pages behavior. Lets say I have an input with disabled="true" and another attribute that makes the two way binding happen ng-model="MyModel".
Our pages were designed to support insert and edit in the same page (it was built on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework), so we use the routes provided by it (and I can't change it).
So, deppending on the user role or any other condition, some fields may have the disabled attribute equals to true or false, and here is where the problems appears.
If the user edit the HTML and change the field that was previously disabled, he can now edit and change my model that he should not be able to change.
Sometimes, such fields cannot be handled(validated) in the backend because the backend knows that it may be changed by a user that has permission to do it.
Note: The user with roles to edit those fields is just an example, sometimes is just impossible to identify using validations in the backend when the field can or cannot be edited, in that case, we apply some view logic to decide when setting a field as disabled or enabled.
Iwas wondering, is there any good approach to handle with this situation? Does anyone faced the same problem? How did you solved the problem?

How to set a modules settings in Drupal 7 programmatically? (admin settings) ( not with hook_form_alter() )

I have modules coming with empty admin setup page.
I'd like to set up this module programmatically.
This page is basically a form. I know I can change this form with hook_form_alter() however for this to work I need to go to this page and press save. This is NOT what i'd like to achieve, I'd like to do it programmatically.
What are my options?
(These modules are not my custom codes. I have them from drupal.org so I have them as they are, I need to write my code that makes this happen. (a module ideally))
Look at the module's code. Most likely, it is storing its configuration in variables, so you should just be able to set the variable from your own code and dodge the form altogether.
The Closest answer can be found here: here
Which says:
look at drupal_form_submit() to programmatically submit a form -- its like visiting the form in a webpage and submitting it without ever opening a browser window. Whatever logic that form does upon submission -- will still happen
Another solution can be that it is storing data as a variable, or just in the database somewhere.

How to auto generate a webpage after user submits form

I am looking for some initial direction on this one because I cannot seem to find my way with it. Let me explain...
I am developing a website wherein a logged in site member (Joomla 1.6) can fill out a simple form and attach a pdf to be uploaded upon submission. The user then clicks the submit button and the page will refresh to a new and unique web page.
User Submits data on http://www.examplesite.com and then after submission a new web page is generated that is called http://www.examplesite.com/userSubmittedValue
This newly generated web page would come from a template that is specified by the administrator and, most important, it will display all of the information that the user submitted. Also, there would be a link to download the pdf they uploaded. The user could then view a list of all the pages they have created in this manner via their profile.
I have seen this all over, but I am at a loss for how to generate this. Any help is much appreciated.
This is not something you will be able to easily do or get a detailed answer for here. If you just wanted to do the submission form with a thank you page that shows the data submitted you could use any number of form wizard type extensions - http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/contacts-and-feedback/forms
If you just needed a way for users to upload PDfs and have access to them you could use one of the file management extensions that offer front end upload features - http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/directory-a-documentation/downloads
If the additional data that is being submitted is simply data related to the file - title, description, etc then one of the file download components should work fine for you. The choices are limited in 1.6 at this time though so you might have to go with 1.5 to get the extension that works best for your needs.
So this probably isn't the best way to do it if your using Joomla but it just might help.
I would use PHP and inside of you're directory have a file like "template.html". Then I would create some php to handle the task of....
Opening "template.html"
Finding and replacing the values that the user passed you
Save the "template.html" under a new name (userSubmittedValue.html)
Again, I never really use Joomla. If you were to try this I'd suggest checking out php's file system functions (http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.filesystem.php).
Hope this helps a bit.

cookies in winforms

I want to save user name and password in a cookie.mine is a win forms application.Please advice how can we do this.
Thanks
In win Forms you should use registry,files,databases.... not cookies, cookies for web applications that usually be displayed in web browsers.
I would suggest using a password protected SQLite database (see System.Data.SQLite) and storing whatever you want there.
Also, do remember to hash your passwords!
This is not supposed to be an answers - more of a comment. Apologies if I posted it in the wrong way:
I expect the person asking the question may be aware that this is not the optimal way to store info in a winforms app. I would also like to know how to do this as a possible way of passing information from a website to a desktop app? For example you want the same app to do different things depending on information pass to the app from the website.
I've found that you can Retrieve Query String Information in a ClickOnce Application (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172242.aspx) which allows you to pass information from a site to an app. I want to know if cookies could also be used to do this.
I suspect it would be difficult and not practical in many situations to read info from a cookie in this way. One way I can think of doing this is putting a GUID in a cookie and also hardcoing that GUID into the app and running a find in files over the computer to find it. I realise that's a very ugly method but I would like to know what's possible.
I suppose another way might be to embeded a Webbrowser control in a winforms app and get the Webbrowser control to load a page containing JavaScript which reads that cookie. You would then need some way of passing that back to the .NET code though?
First, we can't use Cookies in WinForm applications.. it's a Web side functionality, but you can do something else..
For instance, once I had to do the same thing... to save the latest user connected to the application. I did it with a database (I prefere database, because txt files are not that safe.. we can erase them by mistake..)
So I suggest to save the username (and password in your case) on the database after every Connection event.
Hope that was usefull.

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