Forms are useful for transmitting data back to you. Some of their best uses are for comments, feedback and guestbooks. They are made up of a number of objects that help define the information that can be selected or inputted.
The Form Details option is used to set up your CGI-Script. Note that you must have a CGI-Script in order to use forms.
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This defines the location of the actual CGI-Script to be used. The CGI-Script will interpret all the information sent to it.
This will use the CGI-Script provide by us (the makers of Splash!)
Please Note: Only for registered Splash! users. This will define how the information is sent to the CGI-Script. There are two methods, and the method used will depend on the CGI-Script used. If you are using the default CGI-Script, you may use either method.
A Get will send the information as part of the URL and is generally used to request information. A Post will send the information within the document itself and is generally used to send information.
This object allows the browser to accept text input via the keyboard. Such fields are usually used for things like inputting a name or even for typing a password. The following variables help define how this is achieved:
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This defines the number of characters to be displayed inside the box.
How the CGI Script from the form details is going to identify this field.
If you would like a default string or number, this will tell the browser and Splash! to have this variable displayed inside the field when the page loads.
This is used to set the number of characters to be input. Setting this field to 10 will allow 10 characters to be inputted. This value defaults to 255.
This is the same as a Text Field except that in this case, whatever is typed will be echoed back as a * on the monitor. Please note that this is not a secure enough way of sending such things as credit card numbers or other vital information. It will not prevent access to any part of your page.
This is used to give yes/no choices to the viewer by ticking or blanking out the check box. The only settings required for a check box are its name, which tells any scripts how to identify the object, and a setting to tell the browser if it should default to being checked or not.
A Radio field is identical (in terms of functionality) to a Check box except that it offers a different way of displaying the objects. A Radio field is a circle-based "button", whereas a Check box is a box. There is however one extra setting for a radio field that is not required for a Check box, and that is its value. You can call a group of radio buttons the same thing and give each button a separate Value. This way you can have multiple choices for each category, only one of which can be selected. For more information on radio buttons, try our tutorials.
The textarea field is similar in functionality as the Text/Password object. The main difference being that a textarea allows more lines to be displayed, but does not have a password option.
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How the CGI Script (see Form Details) will identify this field.
This will tell Splash! how many rows are to be displayed in the textarea. Setting this value to 5 will display 5 rows.
This tells Splash! how many characters can be displayed per row. If you want to display 40 characters across, then set this field to 40.
This option places a button on the page that can be controlled in two ways. This is determined by the method to submit option below.
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How the CGI Script from the form details will identify this field.
Button Name
When placing a button down on the page, this option will give the button a name. This is so that the form user can identify the button's function.Method to Submit
There are two options here. You can place a submit button, or a reset button. A submit button allows people to have their data submitted to, and processed by, the CGI-Script defined in Form Details. The reset button will reset the form to its original state so that people can re-enter their information into a blank form.Hidden fields are good to keep certain data invisible to the user. It is commonly used for CGI-Scripts. For example, if you had five feedback forms on five different pages you might place a hidden field on each page which simply stated something like 'this is form 3'. This would not appear on your page but on the email you receive upon the forms completion. Thus you would know which form your visitor has used.