Creating a Web Form

Creating A Web Form

About Creating and Using Forms
Form Fields
Special Quickmail Form Fields
Using Quickmail to Process a Form

About Creating and Using Forms

You may wish to have a form on your web page to collect information from people that access your site. Forms are often used for such things as adding people to a mailing list, creating a guest book for people to leave you comments, and any other use where you need or want to communicate with the people viewing your web site. If you are unfamiliar with using web forms yourself, please see Using Web Forms to understand how someone using a browser fills in forms.

Your online forms should NOT be used for online ordering because most shoppers insist on a secure server to safeguard their credit card numbers. If you find that you need online ordering, contact Technet to purchase virtual web services, which allow use of a secure server.

Technet provides a program that processes your forms. This program, quickmail, e-mails to you the information entered into the form. See Using Quickmail to Process Your Form for more information.

You should know basic HTML before using forms. See the HTML Primer and the Online Bibliography for more on HTML in general.

Form Fields

Most graphical HTML Editors and many text-based HTML Editors can insert form fields for you. Please consult the documentation for your editor for more.

All form fields must be between the opening and closing form tags:

<FORM action="POST" method="/cgi-bin/quickmail.pl">Form Tags go here</FORM>

You cannot put a form inside of another form. You can have more than one form on a page.

An important distinction in fields is between normal form fields and hidden form fields. A hidden field is a special kind of field that is not displayed in the browser that you can use to control the way quickmail processes your form. (See Special Quickmail Form Fields for more on the special fields it uses, many, but not all of which are hidden fields.)

The HTML source code for a hidden field looks like this:
<input type="hidden" name="Subject" value="Subject you want e-mail to have">.

Take a look at the Example Form to see some, but not all, of the common form fields.

If you want to limit choice, use form elements that constrain the choices.

Form Element	What It Does	What It Looks Like
Radio Buttons	Makes the user pick one or the other, but never both. You can set one to be selected initially.
HTML: <input type="radio" name="radiobutton" value="value">

Menu or List	Lets the user pick from a list of choices. Depending on how big you set the box to be, they may or may not have to click on the down arrow to see all the choices.
HTML: <select name="select"> <option>Item One</option> <option>Item Two</option> </select>

Checkboxes	Lets the user pick one, some, or all, or even none. Typically used with options.
HTML: <input type="checkbox" name="checkbox" value="checkbox">

Submit Button	Submits the form to be processed. When used with quickmail, this will show the user of the form what their results will look like when emailed to you.
HTML: <INPUT type="SUBMIT" name="Submit" value="Submit">

Reset Button	Lets the user clear the form and start over.
HTML: <INPUT type="RESET" name="name" value="Reset">

Text Field	This allows a single field for input. You can control how many characters the user can put in the field.
HTML: <input type="text" name="name" value="value">

Text Area	This allows room for multiples lines of input. Often used for comments.	This allows multiple lines of input.
HTML: <textarea name="name" rows="4" cols="11">

Example of a Form

To see a form in action, take a look at the Email Form template. You can use this template to create your own forms.

Special Quickmail Form Fields

Quickmail uses a few special fields to control where the contents of a form go as well as the formatting of the results. All of these fields should be set as hidden fields unless otherwise noted.

A hidden field is part of the fields but is not displayed by the browser. These fields are used for processing the forms.

The HTML for a hidden field looks like this:
<input type="hidden" name="Subject" value="Subject you want e-mail to have">.

Special Field Name	What it Does	Should it be Hidden?
to	Stores the email address that the results should be mailed TO. This is probably your Technet email address.	YES
subject	Sets the subject of the email message you'll get.	YES
verifytitle	Sets the subject of the page the person using the form will see after they click submit. This page shows the user what they entered.	YES
email	Stores the e-mail address of the person responding to the form (if they provide it). This should NOT be a hidden field, or else it will never get filled out.	NO!

For more options, please see the Quickmail Help.

Using Quickmail to Process a Form

To use quickmail, make your form action call the quickmail script:

<FORM method="POST" action="/cgi-bin/quickmail.pl">Form Fields</FORM>

Then you can create your form. Refer to Form Fields, and Special Quickmail Form Fields for more details on how to create your form.

Document URL -- http://www.technet.nm.net/menu/doc/create-forms.htm

Last modified on July 15, 1998

Comments to Documentation Manager

For Customer Support please mail questions to:

Customer Support

(505) 345-6555