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:
- 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).
- 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.
Return to the contents page