Form Publishing
Using Drew's Form Manager to capture form data
Web authoring tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage allow you to create electronic forms on which you can request user feedback, conduct surveys, or otherwise add an interactive element to your site. Dreamweaver and FrontPage provide the tools to create the form, but not to actually collect the form data once it goes live. This function is performed by scripts which are installed on Drew's web server. Drew's Form Manager can be configured to send your form submissions via e-mail, or to collect the submitted forms in a database which you can then download and use in programs such as SPSS or QuattroPro.
Form Manager is now the preferred form handler. If you have previously used formmail, please see the notes below for information about moving to Form Manager.
Registering a form with Form Manager
Before you can start collecting data from a form that you have created, it must be registered with Form Manager. Registering your form associates the form with your network account, and also lets you establish the data collection preferences for the form. Form Manager tracks forms by their URL, so it is important that users access your form using a consistent URL. For instance. Form Manager would consider http://www.users.drew.edu/elarsson/myform.html and http://users.drew.edu/elarsson/myform.html to be distinct, even though they may point to the same page on the web server. One way to ensure that users always access your form through the same URL is to not give users the URL of the form directly, but to give them the URL of another page which contains an absolute link to the form.
To register a form:
- Verify that the Action attribute of the form is set to http://forms.drew.edu/ and that the Method attribute is set to POST. If you are using Dreamweaver, the Property Inspector pallet for the form should contain http://forms.drew.edu/ in the Action field and POST in the Method field. If you are using FrontPage, the same settings can be found by clicking on the Options button in the Form Properties window.
Dreamweaver
FrontPage
- Publish your page on one of Drew's web servers. Your form must exist at a real web server URL for forms manager to work correctly. The form may not reside on a local disk or at a network path.
- Go to the form URL yourself using your web browser. Use the URL that you intend to distribute to users or link to from another page; for example http://www.users.drew.edu/elarsson/test.html. Click the Submit button. You should be directed to a Form Manager page indicating that the form has yet to be registered.
- Click Register Form. If you have not yet logged into uLogin, you will be asked to enter your network username and password. After logging in, you will be presented with a form asking you to specify the data collection preferences for your form.
- Specify the desired options for the form. Options which you may use are:
E-mail Notification: Form Manager can send you e-mail each time a user submits your form. The e-mail will contain the values of all the fields the user fills out. You can opt to either have the e-mail sent to your Drew account or an alternate address. You can also choose to have the e-mail sent to a set of multiple addresses.
Collect Data: Form Manager can collect all of the submitted values in a database. Periodically, you can go to the form.drew.edu site to download the collected data in comma-quote delimited format. This format is very easily imported into programs such as SPSS and QuattroPro.
Require User Login: This option requires users to login before submitting your form. This allows for authentication of forms.
Hide User Identity: If you have chosen to require user login, but wish the users to remain anonymous, this option hides the user's identity in the form output that you will see.
Limit Number of Submissions: If you have chosen to require user login, this option allows you to limit each user to one submission of your form.
Redirect After Submission: By default, users will be directed to a page confirming that their submission has been received when they submit your form. This page is very terse and you will most likely want to create your own page thanking the user for their submission and perhaps providing links to other areas of your site. If you create such a page, you can specify that Form Manager should send the user there instead of to the default page by specifying the full URL of that page when you register the form.
- Click Submit. You will receive confirmation that the form has been registered. You may now distribute the URL of your form to end users. Form Manager will collect form data according to your preferences when users submit your form.
Once you have registered your form with Form Manager, you may wish to return to change settings or download your form data. To do so, go to the URL http://forms.drew.edu/ in your web browser. If you have not yet logged into uLogin you will be prompted to enter your network username and password. You will see a display of all of the forms you have registered with the system.
For each for you have registered, the following options are available:
- Modify form settings: This allows you to change the data collection preferences for your form. See Registering a Form above for information on the data collection options available.
- Drop this form: Deletes the form registration from the database. If you have asked Form Manager to collect your form data for you as well, this will purge all of the collected data.
- Download form data: This option only appears if you have asked Form Manager to collect your form submissions in a database. The collected form data will be displayed in comma-quote delimited format for importation into other software, such as SPSS or QuattroPro. Once the data is displayed, you may select File > Save in your web browser to save the document as a text file.
- Purge form data. This option only appears if you have asked Form Manager to collect your form submissions in a database. The collected form data will be purged without deleting the form registration. Use this option when you would like to download form data periodically in small chunks.
Notes for previous users of formmail
If you have published forms at Drew in the past, you may have used the formmail script installed on the web server. Form Manager is now the preferred alternative to formmail and has several advantages, most notably the ability to collect form data in a database. Here are a few things to keep in mind when moving forms from formmail to the new form manager:
- Form Action Attribute: Make sure that the form's ACTION attribute is set to http://forms.drew.edu/ and that the form's METHOD is set to POST.
- Hidden Form Fields: Under formmail, you used the hidden form fields Recipient and Subject to control the destination and subject lines of the e-mail generated by your form. Under the new form manager, the e-mail destination address is stored in the form registration database and may be changed by setting the properties of your form at http://forms.drew.edu/. If you have the hidden form fields Recipient and Subject defined in your form, you may remove them.
- Form Registration: Unlike formmail, the new Form Manager requires you to register your form with the system before it will start collecting data from users. This registration step associates the form with your individual network account and allows you to set the data collection preferences for the form. Follow the steps above for information on registering your form.