Processing Forms

Information Courier supports HTML forms. The interesting question of course is "how can I access what the user types in to the forms I create"?

The browser can't realistically access a CGI program on a server - the user may not even have an Internet connection, and having to distribute a separate program to process the form would defeat the whole point. But being able to process forms could be extremely useful - particularly if you are using InfoCourier to distribute a Product Catalog, or maybe a questionnaire or similar.

To overcome these limitations we have built seven "actions" right in to Information Courier. They are EMAIL, EMAILC, PRINT, PRINTC, FILE, FILEC and STACK.

• STACK will save the responses from the current form internally, until one of the EMAILC, PRINTC or FILEC actions is executed, after which the saved responses will be deleted. Multiple STACK actions may be executed to save the results of multiple forms.
• EMAIL stacks the results of the current form and then sends the current content of the stack back to an E-Mail address you specify (and the user does not need any specific E-Mail software, although he does need a currently active TCP/IP Internet connection). EMAILC performs the same action, but clears the stack after processing.
• PRINT stacks the results of the current form and then uses the current content of the stack as items to replace variables in another HTML form (which will probably be otherwise inaccessible to the user because there is no link to it), which it will then print. PRINTC performs the same action, but clears the stack after processing.
• FILE stacks the results of the current form and ten saves the current content of the stack to a file that the user selects by use of the standard File/Save As dialog. This may be useful to retrieve data either on disk or when the user has an E-mail capability but not using TCP/IP (CompuServe for example). FILEC performs the same action, but clears the stack after processing.

For details of how to use these built-in actions select either :-

• The STACK action
• The FILE/FILEC action
• The PRINT/PRINTC action
• The EMAIL/EMAILC action