NetForms User's Guide: Setting Up Your Entry Form

The first step in allowing users to publish articles is to create the HTML form for authors to enter information into. Creating HTML forms is relatively straightforward and the process is well documented in other places on the net. The entry form described in this section is what you will link to when a user wants to publish a new article.

A NetForms article entry form will have two special characteristics:

  1. Most NetForms entry forms will contain a title or document name field. Making sure each article entered has a title will be very important in order to keep track of different articles entered by different authors. A title is not required by NetForms, but without it, user entered articles will probably overwrite one another (unless the you are just saving the data in a text file using the <TEXTSTORE> command).

  2. Your form will need to use the POST method for processing by the server. Also in the HTML <FORM> command, the action will be "/NetForms.acgi$FDML_Name". The FDML_Name will be replaced by the path and name of the Form Definition file. This file is described in detail in the next section. For additional information on using the POST method, look on the net for a good HTML creation document that talks about forms. The recipe and feedback examples are also good places to look to see how to implement the <FORM> command for NetForms.

Other than these two items, your entry form can contain any HTML element, as long as it is supported by your Web browser(s). For example entry forms, see "A Simple Example" and "A Tricky Example" below.

If you would like only certain users to have the capability to enter articles, you can password protect the entry form using MacHTTP's security. See the MacHTTP documentation for details.


NetForms (C) 1994 by Maxum Development Corp.

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