Data Entry Forms

[geojf3]

Hi all,

Although I am submitting this question in the Dreamweaver forum - please excuse me if this belongs somewhere else.

We have a form that our employees fill out and submit on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.  We get hundreds of these forms weekly.  I am trying to come up with a way to have the data filled out on-line from our website.

We host our own web site and email, so if any added software is needed it would not be a problem.  Our web site is running on a Dell server running  MS Windows 2003 R2 using IIS.  I currently have a few Active Server Pages written in vbscript running for other purposes and I only mention that to indicate that I have some experience with HTML, ASP and SQL and I can pass data from the web to our others servers.

I would like to be able to duplicate the existing paper form as closely as possible for the users to fill out.  The form is two sided and on the front it contains a section of 10 line items - but the actual number of line items that can be sent is unlimited.

We have, currently, the full Adobe suite including Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc.

Any help in the creating of this would greatly be appreciated.

Thank you.

[Jon Fritz]

Are you looking to have the information sent directly into a database, or just to an email address?

[geojf3]

Jon,

It will eventually go to a database.  But I have the vbscript code to connect to the database and update the data using a dummy form I created to test the connections..  It can even be sent to a text file at this point.  My main problem is duplicating the actual form that is needed.

Thank you.

[David_Powers]

I've moved this to the Dreamweaver forum that deals with developing server-side applications.

You don't say whether you want the forms to be printed out or whether the information is to be stored in a database.

For print-outs, you could replicate the forms in Acrobat and get them sent by email. To submit the data to a database, you can use Dreamweaver to create an HTML form. Dreamweaver also has some rather crude server behaviors that would automate the insertion of the data into a database. However, the server behaviors haven't been updated for many years, and they're not capable of validating the input before inserting it into the database. You would be better advised to create your own processing scripts.

Unfortunately, not many people here use ASP. Microsoft stopped development of classic ASP more than a decade ago, and most people have switched to PHP or ASP.NET.

[geojf3]

David, 

I just replied to Jon about the end result needing to be going to a database.

The area I need help is not moving the data to the database, but creating/copying the form and gathering the data.

Thank you.

[Jon Fritz]

I use this PHP form processing script on a few sites:

http://www.tectite.com/formmailpage.php

It works pretty slick. They also give you a basic form to start with, you can add form elements and other info using DW pretty easily. Getting it to look exactly like a printed form is a bit trickier and would require a knowledge of CSS.

[geojf3]

Jon,

While that looks good, it is not what I am trying to accomplish.  I do not want to have the data emailed, I can capture it fine - I just need a way to create the form/page and keep the layout as close to the original as possible.

Thank you.

[Jon Fritz]

In that case, you just use HTML form elements. You can find them in DW under Insert > Form.

First insert the form itself (Insert > Form > Form) then add the other items as needed.

You can use CSS to control the layout, however form elements offer the worst cross browser control with CSS out of just about any element, so make sure to test frequently.