Expression® Web Design

Setting Up Reply To Line in a Frontpage Form

Friday, December 15, 2006

When you open your FrontPage form mail, you will notice a default "From" address. This is because the form submission is actually coming from your site, rather than the person who fills out the form. The way to get the users email in the Reply to line is to follow the method below.

1. Right click inside the Form proper (the dashed or dotted line around your form).
2. Select "Form Properties".
3. Select "Options".
4. Then "E-mail Results" tab.
5. Under "Email message header:" "Reply-to line:" check "Form field name" and type the field name for your user email exactly as it appears in Form field properties.
6. Save and republish.
7. Now when the email is opened, the form will still be sent by the site, but the Reply to will be the users email.

Multiple Email Tutorial for Frontpage

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

You can indeed send results from FrontPage forms to multiple email addresses. It is a little confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it you will be able to do it in your sleep. Just follow the instructions and this will work. Basically, you are setting up a chain of forms with each submitting to a new email account on a single "Submit" from the initial form.

Although these instructions are for FP2000, they will apply to 98 | 2000 | 2003. This tutorial depends on your ability to build a working form which already submits in email. If you are not well versed in FrontPage forms, go back to the Form Wizard or Custom Form tutorials before starting this tutorial.

Before setting up this form chain. Make sure that the Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions have been enabled at your website. If you are publishing to your own server, be sure you are set up to send and receive form mail. In the case of a commercial host, although the host may provide the FPSE, they frequently need to be turned on by either your self or your provider. Occasionally they may need to be reset as well. Remember you are publishing forms. This means publish with FP to an http: location, not with FTP.

Create Frontpage Form One

1. I recommend starting with a new page. So open up a new page to get started.
2. To keep things simple, we are going to refer to our first form page as "Feedback".
3. With the new page open, save this page as "Feedback1".
4. Copy or build a new form on this page. Nothing fancy, just a working form. This is only for practice.
5. OK, Now you have a page labeled Feedback1.
6. If you intend to use this form in your site, save your completed version along with your standard page content. Set this form up to go to your primary form address.
7. Set up your form at Feedback1.htm to send to a single address or to a single address and an optional second file if you wish. This is the form your site visitors will fill out.
8. If you are not sending to an optional second file, I recommend using the default _private/form_results.txt in the file area.
9. If you wish your form to be validated, set this up now as well. It should only be necessary to do validation on Feedback1.htm.
10. I would set "No constraints" for all fields in Feedback2.htm.
11. When your form is satisfactory to you, read on.

Create Form 2

1. Create a second new page.
2. Save this new page as Feedback2.
3. The user will not see this page.
4. On this new page, copy and paste only the form and form fields from Feedback1.htm to Feedback2.htm (nothing else, no text no graphics, no nothing!).
5. Double check to make sure your form is still surrounded by the dashed form line, not just the fields.
6. While on page "Feedback2.htm" go to "Form properties". Set the form for the new page to go to a different email address than in Feedback1.htm. I use an address to back up my form mail to a different location.
7. I recommend using the default _private/form_results.txt in the file area for this page. Do not attempt to send to an optional second file from Feedback2.htm. This could warp things.

Create A Web Page

1. Create a third new page.
2. Save this page as "Confirm.htm".
3. Place what ever content you want on this page to signify user confirmation. This will be a normally visible page on your site.

Backtrack to the Form One

1. Open "Form properties".
2. Check to see that your email is going to your primary address.
3. Check your second file results location if you have one.
4. Go to the Confirmation tab and type in or browse to Feedback2.htm. This is the confirmation page for the user form.
5. Double check all options to see that you have them set up properly.

Now Backtrack to Form Two

1. Open "Form properties".
2. Check to see that your email is going to your secondary address.
3. Go to the Confirmation tab and type in or browse to Confirm.htm. This is the confirmation page for the users submission. (thanks for your order/ whatever).
4. Double check all options to see that you have them set up properly.
5. Make sure that Feedback2.htm has no page content other than the form itself. The user will not view this page so don't worry about background or style issues.

Please Note: As you are looking through and checking your "Form properties" you will notice that the magic behind the curtain, has given our forms the "Form Name:" FrontPage_Form1. Michael strongly recommends leaving this alone. If you need to have a handle for your form, do this under the "E-mail Results" tab in the "Subject line". This way you can know which form you are getting in email.

Now save these pages and publish to your site. Before linking to the new pages, make sure you are receiving the results properly. To check if things are set up right, type in http://www.yoursite.com/Feedback1.htm (remember to use upper or lower case, and htm or html, depending on what you used).

If your FrontPage extensions are properly configured, your results should now go to:

• Your primary email account.
• Your optional file if you chose one.
• Your secondary email account.
• On submit, you should be taken to Confirm.htm.

If you are having problems and are sure your site has sent mail in the past, go back through the tutorial steps to make sure you didn't alter something. The first time Michael did this, he had to go back a couple of times to set the fields up properly.

If things are working well, the you have now successfully set up the form chain to allow a FrontPage form to send to multiple email addresses. I have not tried to add to this, yet, but I imagine if you follow the process further with Feedback3, Feedback4, etc. you can add more addresses to your chain. Remember the last link in the chain will have to point to Confirm.htm. Of course you can use another page name. This one is for instruction purposes.

Frontpage Form Validation

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Once again, if this tutorial is your first stop, we are going to be validating fields from our Custom Form Tutorial. Although it is not necessary to start there, it is a more complete walk through of FrontPage form development.

Michael likes to keep validation with FP as simple as possible. One of the things he dislikes personally about running into a validated form, is that they rarely make allowances for things like first initials with a period (which is how he used his first name) or hyphenated names, which a lot of married women use. So the process of choice is K.I.S.S.

We will start by validating a simple click the field and you will see ...


If you have followed closely from Custom Form Tute, you may noticed that Michael just changed T1 to name. Although he am notorious for using capital letters in form field names, it is generally not a good idea to do this. Anyway, T1 has become name.


All we have done here to validate this text box is to check "Required" and set the minimum length to 2. We have also added Name as the "Display name". We have also left the "Data type" set for "No Constraints". Michael used to always set to 3, but some people like Al, don't have 3 letters. So he am tried to remember to revert to 2 for his validation.

Continue this method for all the text boxes on your form. While you are at it, you might want to change the default names to represent the field labels and clarify this in the Display box as well.

Now that our text boxes are validated, we are going to the Drop Down Menu. Double click it to reach validation. So we have this...


Remember we chose Education Level as the label for our DD. We don't however want this option to be chosen. So we check "Data required" and then "Disallow first choice" to insure it isn't a choice. Now our DD is validated.

Now we move on to our Radio or Option buttons.


Start with your first Radio. Fill in the display name as we have here and just check "Data required". Now when you go to validate your next Radio (assuming you followed along), you will see that it already requires data. This is because the share the same Group name. Do however, double click each to be sure that one of them is not selected. This way we can avoid a default choice, requiring a specific input from the form user.

This stuff is easy isn't it?

Ok, check boxes come next. Oops, we can't validate check boxes with FrontPage. Let's skip this for a minute and move on to our Scrolling Text Box.


As you can see, this validates exactly the same as a one line text box. Michael just put 50 as a minimum so they have to type something. If this is an optional comments area, then you might want to skip the validation.

Back to check boxes. Since the checkbox is designed to be a single choice, or multiple choices in some cases, Michael guessed that Microsoft® didn't see a point to requiring validation. There are JavaScripts available which address this need.

You might also notice that Amysticweb really didn't require any specific input to validate a users email. Once again, this is better done with JavaScript.

Although you can't set checkbox validation with FrontPage, you can with JavaScript.