This page will tell you how to amend our 'Template Web Form' so you can:-
Make the users' Browser go to the page of your choice after the form has been submitted
Send the resulting mail to your email address.
Add a description to the email you receive so you know what it's for.
Make Mandatory (must be filled in by the user) input fields of your choice.
What to do first
First you must get the source code from 'A Template Web Form' into a text editor of some description, for example Microsoft's Notepad.
One way to do this would be to view the 'A Template Web Form' page in your favourite Browser and then use your mouse to RIGHT CLICK on the frame containing the page. From the resulting window choose "View Frame Source". You can then use your mouse to 'highlight' all the source code for the page, then click EDIT, COPY from the toolbar at the top.
You can then open your text editor and use EDIT, PASTE to paste the code into the window.
If you are confident about designing your own form don't forget to set up the the form opening statement as follows:-
<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/genmail.pl" METHOD="POST"> [Note: NT Web Space users or those with their own cgi-bin please make :- ACTION="http://vweb18.hiway.co.uk/cgi-bin/genmail.pl" and the value of RETURNPAGE a fully qualified URL as in ....name="RETURNPAGE" value ="http://www.acme.co.uk/products/thanks.html" ]
And if you are going to design your own web page please make sure that hidden name values are all in Upper case, e.g. ....name="RETURNPAGE" value ="http://www.acme.co.uk/products/thanks.html">
In order to receive the email in a state that you can use the 'reply' button to repond to your customer make the name of the form element you use to ask for their email address='email' as in <input name="email" size=30>
Assigning The Returnpage
Scroll down the code in your text editor until you get to the segment that looks like this:-
You can substitute the URL assigned to the VALUE property with a page of your choice. REMEMBER that it must be a FULL URL and must go between the double quote marks.
Assigning Your Email address
Scroll down the code in your text editor until you get to the segment that looks like this:-
Again you can substitute the Email address assigned to the VALUE property with your Email address. REMEMBER that it must be a VALID Email address and must go between the double quote marks.
Assigning a Description
Scroll down the code in your text editor until you get to the segment that looks like this:-
<input NAME="DESCRIPTION" TYPE="hidden" VALUE="This in an example feedback form.">
Again you can substitute the description assigned to the VALUE property with any short description of your choice. REMEMBER that it must go between the double quote marks.
Assigning Mandatory Fields
Scroll down the code in your text editor until you get to the segment that looks like this:-
<Input Name="realname-mandatory" type="Hidden" Value="You didn't tell us your name.">
First some theory:
Further down the code there is a TEXT type of input field where the user types in his/her name. This field has it's NAME assigned as 'realname' (go and look if you don't believe me!).
The line of code above is an EXTRA HIDDEN field we have added that makes the 'realname' field (that appears further down the code) a Mandatory one, that is one that must be filled in by the user.
It does this by assigning it's NAME property as the field in question (realname) and adds '-mandatory' to it. When this field is passed to the mailing program it will know that the TEXTFIELD called 'realname' is to be a mandatory one.
Having done this we have put a message (which will appear on an error page), into the VALUE property of this tag (again REMEMBERING to put it between double quotes).
As you may have guessed you can assign mandatory fields in your feedback form by inserting code in the following syntax (minus the [ and ] marks):-
<Input Name="[put in the name of the chosen field]-mandatory'" type="Hidden" Value="[tell the user what it was they didn't do]">
So if you wanted to make the form field NAMED 'company' a mandatory one you would insert the following code:-
<Input Name="company-mandatory" Type="Hidden" Value="You didn't tell us your company name">
