Question: Sending a HTML-Link (via email) for updating data

Question

Hello,
I have an simple application which is club member request form.
Anyone who will get a member in our club can type in some personal data and after pressing the create button he will get a confirmation e-mail.
Till here everything works fine.
Now I will put an confirmation link (HTML) in the confirmation e-mail.
The new member should click on this link and the link should update (and commit) a the column "confirm" in my new_member table depending on an ID.
Now my problem:
I have no idea how this link should look like.
Thanks for help

Answer 1

Generally, this kind of implementation goes deeper than just what the link looks like. In fact, what the link looks like depends entirely on how you've implemented the confirmation process in your database.
Although I've never done this specifically, I have given considerable thought to how it would be implemented. I thought that I would have a specific table that would hold pending confirmations. This table would hold some kind identifying data as well as a unique ID that would identify the row, probably something that looked like a GUID.
Given this table structure there would probably be a trigger or PL/SQL process that took the pending member information and moved it into the members table when the member clicked on a confirmation button on the confirmation page. Therefore, the link that is sent to the user would need to look something like this:
http://[yourhost.domain:port]/pls/[your DAD]/f?p=&app_id.:[your confirmation page #]&session.::::[your page item name]:[the unique ID for the member]
The page item name is the item you define on the confirmation page that will hold the confirmation ID and the unique Id comes out of the table for the specific membership you're confirming.
Again, this is conceptual since I've not done this specifically, but it should give you a place to start.
Earl