ASP Data Collection Forms- Form Attributes

Author: JoJo
Author's Site: Webade
Reference ID: 15623

Setting the Attributes in the Properties Inspector

At this point we will look at the Property Inspector, also called the PI.

If we click on the form field we have just inserted the property inspector will look like the image below.

We have a couple of things to do in the PI, first we will give the text field a meaningful name. If we don't do this it will become extremely difficult to manage the response page, this will become apparent when we begin working on the response page.

I have named the text field: firstname

The Char Width I have set to: 12
This restricts the width of the the text field though other factors do come into play such as fontsize, the larger the font the more space 12 characters will need, likewise the height of the text field is effected in the same manner. Their was no real need to restrict the width in this example, but if your form is to go into a side bar or similar it can be necessary to do this to keep the design of your page as you would wish.

Max Chars: 30
This value sets a limit on the amount of characters that can be inserted into the text field. I'm going to set this to thirty which should be more than enough for a First Name.

Single line: Selected
Again a single line text field should be ample for a first name.

Init Val: Blank
The initial value for the text field I have left blank, this means the text field will be empty when viewed. Should I wish to prompt a user or supply information I would set the initial value in the box provided, whatever you type into this box will be shown in the text field when the page loads.

How the PI Should Look Now

Your Property Iinspector should now look like the image above. It does, great! Lets move on to the form itself.

Setting the Form

It's good practice to name everything, especially if the page is a busy page containing more than one form. By default when we insert our form it is given a name of form1, should we insert a second form it is called form2 and so on. It quickly becomes easy to see the advantages of naming our page elements. We'll start off with good habits and give our form a "proper name".

Click inside your form, anywhere will do. On the bottom left hand side of the status bar you will see a series of tags depending on where inside the form you clicked. Select the <form> tag by clicking it as below, your PI will now be showing the forms attributes as in the right hand image below.

First we will give the form a name, I've called mine: info

Now we need to tell the form what to do when the user clicks the submit button, we do this by setting the forms Action box.

Setting the form's action:
To make sure we set the action correctly we will click on the folder icon and then browse to the receiving page, this elimnates the possibility of spelling errors or the like which will prevent our form from doing its job. In our case we want to set the action to the form_response.asp page.

Your PI should now look like the image below with the <form> tag selected on the status bar.

The methods

The method drop list provides alternate methods of passing the data from the form page to the response page, we will use the post method. The post method works (briefly) like this, the URL of the response page is sent to the server and when the server sees the "post" declaration it waits for the information that the post declaration says will follow. This is the preferred transfer method stated by the W3C.

With the alternate method of "get" the browser transfers the information as part of the URL.