G053 - Lecture 17

Making Forms Work

Mr C JohnstonICT Teacher

www.computechedu.co.uk

Session Objectives

Understand the difference between client side and server side scripting

Understand the steps needed to go through in order to make you forms work

Client vs Server Side Scripting

Client side scripting are scripts which are run on the computer which is displaying the website

These often add some sort of interactivity to the website

The validation written in JavaScript last lesson is an example of client side scripting

Server side scripting are commands run by the computer hosting the website

Often server side scripting is based around databases – querying them to generate dynamic webpage's or dumping data collected from a form.

Client Side vs Server Side

ASP, CGI, PHPScript

Making Form Work Step #1

Edit your <form> tag so that it includesmethod=“post” action=“?????????.asp” - ???????.asp is the name of the script file

Making Form Work Step #2

Check each form field has a sensible name and make a note of its name on a piece of paper

NB if your validation works this should have already been doneNo spaces are allowed to be used in fieldnamesIgnore the duplicate password field, reset and submit button

Making Form Work Step #3

Create an Access Database with a sensible name which contains a table with the sensible name..

In the table create a field with exactly the same name as the fields in your form – set all the data types to text

Making Form Work Step #4

Find the process.asp generator on my website and follow through the steps.

1. Count the number of fields on the form (remember to ignore duplicated password field, reset and submit button.

2. Copy the field names into the boxes. Enter the name of the database and the table. Press “Show my code” to show the code

Making Form Work Step #5

Copy and paste the red code into notepad and save the file in your wwwroot folder as process.asp

Your may need to customise it to make it look good - insert tags after the last %> and remember to show evidence of this for task D

More Than One Form?? Add action=“process2.asp” method=“post” to form tag Create a second table within your database called mytable2 - use the same

code generator and edit the ASP code so any reference to myTable becomes myTable2!!

<%@ language="vbscript"%><!--#include file="Adovbs.inc"-->

<% 'this code was written by Mr C Johnston CompuTech Education 2004

name = request.form("name")address1 = request.form("address1")address2 = request.form("address2")postcode = request.form("postcode")Set dbConn = Server.CreateObject ("ADODB.Connection")strConnect = "Data Source=" & Server.Mappath("dbase/myDatabase.mdb") & ";Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;"dbConn.Open strConnect

Set RS = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")RS.ActiveConnection = dbConnmySQL = "select * FROM myTable"RS.open mySQL, dbconn, adOpenStatic, adCmdTable

Change to myTable2

Then save as process2.asp

Exercise Show any alternations you manually make to code

and use the steps described to create process.asp and myDatabase.mdb

Once finished it will not work until your site has been uploaded so don’t panic – the browser should either just display the code or ask you to download the file