Question

I am a behavorial scientist and usually collect data by letting participants do some tasks on a computer and record their responses (I write the programs using the pyglet wrapper PsychoPy). That is, the program runs locally and the data is stored locally.

Now I would like to know if there is a way to use Python to display a (local) website with html-forms to the user and collect the input (locally). The reason for this idea is that currently whenever I want to display checkboxes, radiobuttons, or input fields I use wxPython. This works quite well, but programming and layouting in wxPython is kind of cumbersome and I would prefer html with forms.

A requirement would be that it would need to rum without any borders, adress field, menu bar, … The reason is that I need it in kind of fullscreen mode (I currently open a non-fullscreen pygflet window in the size of the screen to hide the desktop) so that participants can do nothing but work on the forms.

So I am looking for a way to (a) display html websites including html form above a pyglet window with no menu bar or whatsoever, (b) collect the input when clicking on the Ok button (i.e., the form is send), (c) control what is presented prior and after viewing this website, and (d) everything of this should happen locally!

My idea would be that the data is collected when participants hit the “Send away” button in the following example pic and the next page is displayed.

Update: I use windows (XP or 7).

Answer 1

This is a solution using Qt Webkit for rendering HTML. The default navigation request handler is wrapped by a function that checks for submitted form requests. The form uses the “get” method, so the data is included in the url of the request and can be retrieved that way. The original request is declined and you can change the content of the displayed web page as you wish.

from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtWebKit

app = QtGui.QApplication([])
view = QtWebKit.QWebView()

# intercept form submits
class MyWebPage(QtWebKit.QWebPage):
    def acceptNavigationRequest(self, frame, req, nav_type):
        if nav_type == QtWebKit.QWebPage.NavigationTypeFormSubmitted:
            text = "<br/>\n".join(["%s: %s" % pair for pair in req.url().queryItems()])
            view.setHtml(text)
            return False
        else:
            return super(MyWebPage, self).acceptNavigationRequest(frame, req, nav_type)
view.setPage(MyWebPage())

# setup the html form
html = """
<form action="" method="get">
Like it?
<input type="radio" name="like" value="yes"/> Yes
<input type="radio" name="like" value="no" /> No
<br/><input type="text" name="text" value="Hello" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Send"/>
</form>
"""
view.setHtml(html)

# run the application
view.show()
app.exec_()