About creating forms

What is a form?

A form on a web site is similar to a paper form. You can use it to gather information from site visitors, such as collecting their order, shipping, and billing information. Typically, site visitors type their information in form fields and indicate their preferences by clicking option buttons, check boxes, and drop-down boxes. The can also enter comments in text boxes.

Microsoft FrontPage enables you to create a form based on the type of information you want to gather from site visitors by either starting with a blank form that you can build on (by adding fields) or by using the Form Page wizard. You can specify how to collect the data the site visitors entered — the form results — and decide how you want to display the results to the site visitor in the form of a confirmation page.

Note   For forms to function on a web site, you must publish your web site to a web server running the  Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint Team Services from Microsoft. Your web administrator or Internet service provider (ISP) can tell you if this software is installed on your Web server.

Types of commonly used forms

Note   FrontPage includes templates to create a guestbook, registration, or feedback form. You can also use wizards ,such as the Database Interface Wizard, to create a form that saves data to a database.

Creating the form

There are several steps to creating an online form with Microsoft FrontPage. After you have completed all of them, you have the option to go back and change certain properties. For example, if your list of products has expanded, you can add those products to the options that a site visitor chooses from in a drop-down box. Or, you may decide that instead of having form results sent to you in an e-mail, you want FrontPage to create a database to store the information.
  1. Adding fields to the form   Fields can be text boxes, option buttons, push buttons, and so forth, depending on the kind of information you want the get from the site visitor. After placing fields on your form, you can lay them out on the page as you would text, using line breaks, tables, cascading style sheets, and positioning.  There are many different kinds of fields, and you can even customize them to suit your needs.  

    The various form fields

  2. Setting up functionality for each field   After you have decided what types of fields to add to your form, you can define what you want them to do and how you want them to look. You can type directly on the firm to include field labels and instructions. You can also set the properties for each field. For example, you can specify the length of a text box, decide whether an option is selected by default, and define the choices in a drop-down box.
  3. Setting data entry rules   Also called "validation," data entry rules ensure that a site visitor fills out the form correctly. For example, you can set up an order form for your products, but unless the name, address, and payment information are correctly entered, your customer won't be able to complete and submit the order.

    You can also specify a format for the information you want to collect. For example, to collect a credit card number, you can set up a text box that only accepts numbers and hyphens, and  disallows other characters. You can also require a fixed number of characters so that a site visitor does not omit a number by mistake.

  4. Setting up how you want to collect that information   After a site visitor submits the form, you must collect the data that was entered — the form results — so you can view them, display them to the visitor, or work with them as needed. FrontPage provides several form handlers, which take the form results and perform various actions. For example, when a site visitor submits a form, FrontPage can save the contact information to a customer database. Or, you can have the form results sent to you in an email or saved as a text or HTML file.  
  5. Adding a confirmation page   FrontPage automatically displays a confirmation page to your site visitor (unless you are using a custom script). You can also create your own confirmation page and decide which fields to show your site visitor. If you do not create and assign a confirmation page of your own, FrontPage will use the default confirmation page, which displays a list of all the field names from the form and their values.
  6. Creating keyboard shortcuts   A keyboard shortcut enables a site visitor to select a field in a form by using the keyboard rather than by clicking the field. The shortcut appears as an underlined letter in the field label— the site visitor selects the field by pressing ALT plus the underlined letter.
  7. Specifying the tab order for the form   Site visitors can navigate through a form — move from field to field — by pressing the TAB key. By default, the order of fields on the page (from top to bottom) is the order in which a visitor can tab through the form. You can, however, specify a different tab order.