The WebCom Forms Processor - Introduction

The Web Communications Forms Processor is a tool that WebCom customers use to put their own custom fill-out forms on their World Wide Web pages with no programming. The results of each form submission are simply emailed to the you, or to whatever email address you specify.

You can specify alternate and/or more sophisticated handling of your form data by setting options for your form. If you really want to get fancy, you can create a configuration file for your form, which can do things like validate information on the form and reject it with error message(s) to the submitter, which explain why the form was not sucessfully submitted. WebCom customers have developed sophisticated applications such as bulletin board systems using the Forms Processor, yet it is simple enough for non-technical people to use effectively as well!

(NOTE: if you are using an authoring tool to create forms, you probably do not need to be concerned about the HTML "tags" inside a form which are explained below. In that case, after you have created your form with your authoring tool, you only need to be concerned with the setting the "ACTION" of your form to the WebCom Forms processor, and the two required "HIDDEN" fields (see below)).

Forms reside within normal HTML documents. HTML pages containing forms are distinct from regular HTML pages by having :

FORM tag - This is a tag which marks the beginning of a form in an HTML page, and tells the form to send the data from the form to the Forms Processor for handling. With forms at WebCom the FORM tag almost always looks the same:

<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://webcom.com/~webcom/cgi-bin/form">

As this marks the beginning of the form, you must also mark the end of the form with a </FORM> tag, which should be placed after all of the following form elements.

PLEASE NOTE: The only permissible uses of the Forms Processor are:

• Invoking the Forms Processor by specifying it in the ACTION of opening FORM tag as shown above. Other methods of invoking the Forms Processor, including using the Forms Processor in an anchor tag, are not permitted.
• The Forms Processor may only be invoked by forms in your WebCom account. You may not have a Web page on another Web server which invokes the WebCom Forms Processor.

Input fields - These are HTML tags which create areas where information can be entered by the Client.

Two required hidden fields which tell the Forms Processor 1) which WebCom account the form came from, and 2) the filename of an optional configuration file for the form.

A Submit button - This sends the data which the client has entered into the input fields to the Forms Processor for processing.

When your form contains these basic elements, any data entered into the form and submitted is automatically emailed to your email box.

If you would like to do something different or more sophisticated with the data from your form, you will want change the forms parameters (options) or create a configuration file for the form.