Jeremy Simmons: The Blog

Most of the largish companies I've worked at have a online phone-book for employees.

There's always some kind of a web-interface, with a search form on or near the front page of the intranet. It's wasteful of my time to open a browser, wait for it to load the home page, click into the form, type my query, and hit enter or click the search button.

It's much faster to START+R, type "p jones" and hit enter, and let the magic happen.

Open your user profile (START+R, %USERPROFILE% or just "." (quotes aren't necessary, they're for just for emphasis in this blog)), and enter.

Create a new batch script named p.cmd. I find the easiest way to do this is to Select New Text Document from the file menu, and rename it. This obviously only works if you have the 'Hide extensions for known file types' option turned off in your Windows Explorer preferences. (Tools, Options, View tab)

my batch file currently looks like this

start "phonebook" "c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe" http://<intranet>/<application>?sortField=FullName^&sortOrder=ASC^&searchAnywhere=OFF^&searchName=%1

You'll obviously need to be URI savvy enough to get your own URI from the application (assuming that it uses the GET verb)

Important things to note are that the ampersand character (&) must be escaped with the caret (^) because this command will be processed at the Windows NT Command line, and ampersand is the way that two commands are chained together. (i.e. DO THIS & DO THAT.) and finally the %1 which is the first command line parameter in the script I execute.

Watch for a follow up entry where I describe how to do this when you have a web-form that uses the POST method in the form (this makes me cry, your corporate web-developers should not be using POST to retrieve information)