Although creating forms for the web is easily accomplished with
most any HTML editor (eg. Dreamweaver, GoLive, etc.), posting
the data from the form requires a program on the webserver to
process the data. We have one general purpose form processing
script that mails the results to a selected account at csulb.edu,
named "formmail.cgi". This arrangement uses hidden fields
built into your form to pass along required configuration information
to the script which is called with the "action" attribute
of your "form" tag. For example:
<form name="myform"
action="http://www.csulb.edu/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi"
method="POST">
is typical of form tags which use our "formmail.cgi"
script.
You must include a hidden field specifying the "recipient"
email address (eg. "youracct@csulb.edu"). Moreover,
the recipient address must consist of a CSULB email account name
followed by "@csulb.edu". Attempts to use off-campus
or multiple recipients will be rejected. To route the output to
multiple recipients, set up a CSULB email alias pointing to the
list of recipients. This hidden field would typically look like:
<input type=hidden name="recipient" value="acct@csulb.edu">
You may also include hidden fields to specify:
- "email":
the email address that the mail will appear to be sent from,
and/or
- "subject":
the subject line that will appear on the email message.
These fields may even be included as text fields on the form if
you wish to request that your form users provide this information
about themselves.
If you include a hidden field called "required" with
a comma separated list of other form field names as its value,
the script will reject postings which omit data from any of these
required fields. You may also include hidden fields to specify
common style characteristics of the acknowledgment page such as
"bgcolor", "text_color", "link_color",
"vlink_color", etc. If you need some form processing
that is not specifically offered by "formmail.cgi",
then you may build your own CGI script to process the form. Even
more complex form handling by database applications is possible,
but requires that you obtain access to a web database server.
