FP Editor: Forms

Using FrontPage 98
Forms

A Basic Form

Forms are a useful way to collect information from visitors to your web page. If your FrontPage web is located on a FrontPage server, you can use some of it's built-in forms-processing tools to take care of the data. You can still use the FrontPage Editor to create HTML forms for pages that will be saved on another type of server, but you will have to specify a separate CGI script to process the form data.
We'll be creating a simple Guestbook form here as an example. First, go to Form Field in the Insert menu, and choose "One-Line Text Box" to get started.

This will create a text box (where people can type things), a Submit button, and a Reset button, all surrounded by a dashed line (shown selected here). Any further form fields should go within this dashed box if they are part of the same form (and you should usually only have one form per page to avoid confusion).

Form Properties
Right-click within the dashed box and choose "Form Properties". Here, you can tell where the results will be saved and how they should be formatted, among other things.
     Our NT server does not allow you to choose to have the results e-mailed through the native FrontPage form handling. Use the FormMail script for this (available only inside the CS Department).
     You can specify that the form should be processed by a CGI script on a separate server in the Form Properties window. Simply choose "Send to Other", then click Options. Enter the URL of the CGI script as the Action.
     Each field within your form should have a name associated with it; enter this by double-clicking the form and inserting it in the Name field. Here, you can also control other characteristics of the field, like how long a text box should be, or whether a button is selected by default or not.

Fields
More information about specific field types is given in the FormMail information page (available only inside the CS Department).

Sample
Below is a simple guestbook form. Test it out by submitting your information, then click the "See Guestbook Results" link to see how that information is stored (in this case, as an HTML file). Also, note that you can use tables to control the position of various fields within the form.



Guestbook		Name:
		E-mail:
		City:
		State:

See Guestbook Results



Working with Form Results		Unless you're leaving your form results browsable to the world, you should always copy them to a different location (usually your home directory) before opening the results file to view the content. If you open the results directly from the web server, anyone who tries to submit form data during that time will not be allowed to do so, since you've effectively locked the file.



Tutorial Navigation		FormMail Available only in the CS Department End of Tutorial. Go to the Home page.