NetForms User's Guide: A Text Storage Example

The real power of NetForms is in generating HTML documents, but there will probably be times when you want to create a form to get user input and do something else with the information. For example, you may want to load the data into a spreadsheet or into your favorite database application.

NetForms will handle this processing for you as well, by simply creating and maintaining a simple text file. The Mailing List Sign-Up form is the example included here.

In this example, there are three files that do all the work. "TextEntry.html" is the standard HTML entry form and "TextResponse.html" is a simple document that displays a nice message after the user has submitted the form. The interesting (and very simple) file, used by NetForms to process the form is...


<TEXTSTORE>"/TextDemo/MyStore.text" "/TextDemo/TextResponse.html"</TEXTSTORE>
UserName    
EMail    
HomePage    
Organization    
Release
The "TextEntry.FDML" file

The first line is the TEXTSTORE command, which includes the names of two files. The first is the name and path to the file where the data should be put. If this file doesn't exist, NetForms will create it the first time the form is submitted by a user. Each additional form submitted will simply be added to the end of the file.

The second file specified in the TEXTSTORE command is the name of the HTML document NetForms will show the user after they have submitted the form.

All of the following lines are simply the names of the fields on the entry form. The order in which the field names appear here will be the order they are stored in.

That's it. The tabs-delimitted ASCII file will now be maintained by NetForms. What you do with the file is up to you, but virtually all word processing, database, and spreadsheet applications will read it, when configured properly. Many personal information managers and other types of software will read the information as well.


NetForms (C) 1994 by Maxum Development Corp.

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