118477 - Form manager supplies values for incorrect fields

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Form Manager, defect)

Description

[John Reinke]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011221
BuildID:    2001122108

When I use the form manager to complete some forms, it attempts to use data from
the incorrect field (even from a field that has already been filled) to complete
the form.

***This is probably a bug for all platforms, but I haven't tested it on anything
other than Linux.***

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Have form manager data entered and up-to-date with correct values.
2.Go to the link above. (It just enters for a free guitar giveaway. If you
accidentally enter, you won't get a magazine subscription or anything!)
3. Select the Prefill Form option from the Edit menu (or right-click on the
form), and the values suggested are in the actual results section below.

Actual Results:  The Prefill Form Data window that opens contains the following
fields and results:

Name.First:  (correct: my first name)
Name.Last:  (correct: my last name)
Home.Street.Line1:  (correct: my street address)
Home.Street.Line1:  (incorrect: it should have chosen my Line 2 data for the
form, even though the text on the web page labeled them both as "Address". It
chose my street address.)
Home.State:  (incorrect: it should have chosen my saved data for "City". It
chose my state.)
Home.State:  (correct: my state, although sometimes it misses this field
altogether when completing similar forms)
Home.PostalCode.Prefix:  (correct: my zipcode)
Home.Country:  (correct: my country)
Home.Email:  (correct: my email address)


Expected Results:  It should have filled in the appropiate saved data into the
corresponding fields in form.


Comments:
While I didn't program the form manager, I'd guess that it uses the text on the
web page to decide which data to place in a specific field in the form. I'd
suggest that the form manager use either the NAME attribute of the INPUT tags,
or a combination of the two methods for more intelligent "guessing" as to which
data goes where.

For example, in the URI above, if the form manager looked at this HTML tag:

<input SIZE="30" NAME="Address2" maxlength="30">

it could guess by the "2" that it should look at the data I have saved in the
form manager for "Line 2". Since I have saved no data in the "Line 2" field, it
should then know to leave that field in the form blank.

Of course, this requires a whole new level of AI, and paying attention to
special cases. At the very least, I'd think the form manager could guess that
the same data wouldn't normally be needed twice in a row.

That's just my uninformed suggestion...

Comment 1

[Stephen P. Morse]

That's wonderful -- it got 7 fields correct.  Looks like form-manager is 
behaving just like it is supposed to. ;-)

Keep in mind that this is just an heuristic -- there is no absolute algorithm 
for always recognizing every field correctly.  Since the form labelled both 
fields as "address", of course form manager filled in your address in both 
cases.  Had it left off the word address on the second field, form manager would 
have indeed filled in your address-line-1 on the first and your address-line-2 
on the second.

Be thankful for those fields that it got right and don't fret over the ones that 
it got wrong.