Frequently Asked Questions: Forms
On this page:
How do forms work on web.mit.edu?
How can I use email to send information from forms?
Examples
Adding a success page
Forms and HTML editors
Utilities to work with forms
How do forms work on web.mit.edu?
The cgi script that web.mit.edu uses to process email forms requires two documents, an HTML file and a text file. The HTML file contains what the form will actually look like. It must have a <form> tag with the following syntax:
<form method="post"
action="http://web.mit.edu/bin/cgiemail/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/i/ist/comments.txt">
Where <action> must contain http://web.mit.edu/bin/cgiemail plus the full path of your text file. It must also have a submit button, and optionally a reset button:
<input type="submit" value="send email" />
<input type="reset" value="reset this form" />
The text file is a template for how the email will look. It will have bracketed variables, such as [email], that correspond to the email address submitted through the form. See below for full examples of both these documents.
For general information on form tags see the W3C's XHTML 1.0 Specification.
Examples
This is an example generated using the mkcmtform script.
HTML Document
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Comment Form for comment@mit.edu</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>
<img alt="MIT" src="http://mit.edu/img/mit-daily-logo.gif" />
Comment Form for comment@mit.edu</h1>
<hr />
<!-- NOTE: the ACTION below must be changed if comments.txt
is ever moved from the directory it is now in:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/c/cwis/ -->
<form method="post"
action="http://web.mit.edu/bin/cgiemail/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/c/cwis/comments.txt">
From: (your email address please)<br />
<input name="email" size="30" /><br />
Subject: (please don't leave blank)<br />
<input name="required-subject" size="60" /><br />
Message:<br />
<textarea name="required-body" rows="10" cols="60"></textarea>
<p>
You may <input type="submit" value="send email" /> when done, or
<input type="reset" value="reset this form" /> if you want to start over.
</p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Text Template
From: [email]
To: comment@mit.edu
Subject: [required-subject]
Errors-To: web-request@MIT.EDU
[required-body]
----
NOTE: This message was sent using a WWW form. The address [email]
was typed manually, and may easily be incorrect.
Tip: add a cc: [email] in the text file (on its own line between From: and To:) to send a copy of the message to the sender
Adding a Success Page
To show a web page (such as a thank you page) once a person has submitted a web form, put in a "success" line that refers to the URL you want the users to see after submitting the page. Make sure the value is a full url (including http://).
<input type="hidden" name="success" value="http://web.mit.edu/successpage.html" />
Forms and HTML Editors
In order to use web authoring software such as Dreamweaver, you need to generate the HTML document as instructed in Dreamweaver documentation and then create a text file that resembles the example above manually with a text editor. You may also have to manually change the <form> tag to make sure it has the right syntax. You can also use the translateform script.
Utilities
There are two utility scripts that are available on web.mit.edu to make processing forms easier. Translateform extracts form tags and puts them into a template for cgiemail and process-comments converts specially formatted text into tab-delimited records (often used to format text to be included in a spreadsheet or database).
