Handling Forms in VisualFormat

jwl

One of our customers, having switched over to our TeamSite offering for creating webpages, wants to put forms into the Visual Format field that we provide in their generic web-page DCT. This would involve <form action="some server side program"> in the html. This program would save some form data into a database, then redirect the user to the next page.
What options do I have? Is this best done writing a perl CGI script?
We have TS552 on Solaris.
Thanks,
John

Adam Stoller

I believe there was a recent posting about the VFE not handling HTML forms - so you'd probably have to provide your own custom CGI for this - but that seems like a fair amount of work to go through if you're trying to do it in WYSIWYG form (rather than having them type in raw-code). Probably worth searching the internet to see if you can find existing products (free, share, or cost) that provide the kind of UI you're looking for and then see if you can integrate it as a callout within the DCT rather than trying to completely [re-]invent the wheel yourself.

The only other way I can think of doing this is with some nested container/replicant fields where you prompt for field data (type, name, label, size, value, etc.) - the UI would probably be a bit klunky but it would probably be a better answer than telling your customer to learn how to write the raw-code ;-)

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com