About collecting data from forms

After you decide what form fields to put on your form, the next step is to set rules for the ways you want your site visitors to enter data in the fields. These data entry rules, also called validation, 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 customer's name, address, and payment information are correctly entered, he or she won't be able to complete the order.

Setting rules for how site visitors enter data in forms

• Types of rules you can set for your form fields:

  Text box validation

  You can specify the type of data to allow and set other criteria for text boxes and text areas. For example, to collect a credit card number, set up a text box to accept only numbers and hyphens, and disallow all other characters. You can also require a fixed number of characters so that a site visitor does not omit a number by mistake.

  Option button validation

  You can require a selection to be made from a group of option buttons. For example, if your form has two option buttons, Yes and No, and a site visitor tries to submit the form without making a selection, a message is displayed.

  Drop-down box validation

  You can require a site visitor to make a choice from a drop-down box, set the minimum and maximum number of choices to allow, and disallow the first choice from being selected. For example, you can disallow the first item from being selected if it is an instruction, such as "Select an item."

After setting up the data entry rules, you need to decide how you want the form results are handled. 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.

Handling information you collect from the form

• FrontPage provides several form handlers, which take the form results and perform various actions.

  Save the results to a database

  Each time a site visitor submits a form, Microsoft FrontPage saves the information to a database. For example, if you use a form to collect contact information, you can save the results directly to your customer database. You can save results to an existing database or FrontPage can create one for you.

  Save the results to a text or HTML file

  Each time a site visitor submits a form, Microsoft FrontPage attaches the results to a file. You can then open the file and view the results. For example, you set up a guest book for your web site and choose to save the results to an HTML file. You can create a link to the file so that site visitors can see what others have written.

  Send the results in e-mail

  Each time a site visitor submits a form, FrontPage sends you an e-mail message containing the results of that form.

You can also choose to use your custom scripts to handle the form results.

Note   If you use any of the form handlers rather than a custom script, the Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint Team Services from Microsoft must be installed on the server on which your web site is located.