AUTOMATED GENERATION OF A WORLD-WIDE WEB-BASED DATA-ENTRY AND CHECK PROGRAM FOR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

The World Wide Web-based form is a promising method for the constructi on of an on-line data collection system for clinical and epidemiologic al research. It is, however, laborious to prepare a common gateway int erface (CGI) program for each project, which the World Wide Web server needs to handle the submitted data. In medicine, it is even more labo rious because the CGI program must check deficits, type, ranges, and l ogical errors (bad combination of data) of entered data for quality as surance as well as data length and meta-characters of the entered data to enhance the security of the server. We have extended the specifica tion of the hypertext markup language (HTML) form to accommodate infor mation necessary for such data checking and we have developed software named AUTOFORM for this purpose. The software automatically analyzes the extended HTML form and generates the corresponding ordinary HTML. form, 'Makefile', and C source of CGI programs. The resultant CGI prog ram checks the entered data through the HTML form, records them in a c omputer, and returns them to the end-user. AUTOFORM drastically reduce s the burden of development of the World Wide Web-based data entry sys tem and allows the CGI programs to be more securely and reliably prepa red than had they been written from scratch. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevi er Science Ireland Ltd.