HTML: A Guide to Hard-Coding

 

Making Your Form Work

Now that you've made a form, you need to make it work.

The easiest and most common thing that people do is have the contents of the form emailed to themselves.

Bama has already set up the program you need to email the contents. If you do not have your form on Bama, then you will have to find out if your server has the program set up, and if so, what is the address of the program. Then you would follow the same instructions below, but change the address to the one of your program on your server.

Bama uses a program called "FormMail." This program essentially takes the contents of your form and emails it to you. The main part of setting up your form to use FormMail is making sure you have the proper fields in it. Some will be hidden fields, while some will be fields you may already have in your form.

Important: You must put in field names exactly as they appear! Changing the case, misspelling, or renaming a field will all cause your form not to work properly.

Remember that a field has a name that you give it when you set it up and it also has a value, which is usually filled in by the user. You can also set the default value, which is especially important in hidden fields, which the user cannot set a value for. When you are using a script like FormMail, you must make sure that the names of particular fields match what the script expects.

• Hidden Fields

Hidden fields are used to pass information to the script that you don't want to be part of the visual form. These fields are not completely hidden; they are easily viewable by looking at the source code. Do not use hidden fields as an alternative to security! The tag for a hidden field is simple, and is very similar to the tags you've already used:

<input type=hidden name="name" value="value">

• Recipient

This is the only required field. This is how FormMail knows what e-mail address to send the information from the form to. Put "recipient" as the name and your e-mail address as the value.

<input type=hidden name="recipient" value="emailaddress">

• Subject

This is very useful if the form information is being sent to a mailbox that is used for other things, especially other forms! Put "subject" as the name and the desired subject line as the value. All e-mail from this form will have the subject line you specify.

<input type=hidden name="subject" value="subject of your email">

• Required

If you want FormMail to do some simple form validation for you, simply tell it which fields must be filled in. If the form is submitted without all the required fields, the user will be directed to an error page, and the e-mail will not be sent. Put "required" as the name and a list of field names (separated by commas) as the value.

<input type=hidden name="required" value="fieldname, fieldname, fieldname">

• Connecting

To connect your form to the FormMail script, make sure the opening form tag looks like this:

<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/FormMail" METHOD=POST>

 

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