This seems like a pretty hefty first project
First, it would be better to send them an email with a link to the page on your web server, this way you can use standard ASP to do all of your work.
Second, if you do mail them the form it will have to be in HTML only, no ASP, because ASP has to be processed by the correct DLL before it can be viewed or you just get an ugly page full of a mixture of code and random tags that were resolved. Also when they mail the form back it would be a real pain for them to have to open a web browser to let you know. Since ASP is a server-side web language it doesn't run without a request coming in for a page, so someone would have to request the page that would read the email, to insert the data. Which brings us to reading email, wel actually, you may already see how incredibly comlpicated this will get.
Third Option, kinda like the first: Mail them an HTML form, but in the form tag specify a direct URL including domain/ip in the action so that all they need to do is submit the form and it gets submitted to your ASP page on the server.
Let's go with my first and third option.
Basically you will need your HTML form. In the case of it going on the webserver there is no need to specify a full path to the server, only the local file, In the case of the email you will want to specify a full path (or it won't work), Like so:
<!-- This would be the form tag if the page was on your server -->
Code:
<form method="POST" action="resolveForm.asp">
<!-- Form tag for emailed form -->
Code:
<form method="POST" action="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.myServer.com/resolveForm.asp">[/URL]
<!-- Note: You could use the second form tag in either case, the reason it's generally frowned on, however, is that if you ever move the page, or try to put the pages on a new server, you will need to change the address in all of you form tags to point at the correct server/folder whereas the first tag always points at the same directory they are viewing the file from. -->
<!-- Sample Inputs -->
Code:
Your Name:<input type="text" name="txtName"><br>
Your Phone:<input type="text" name="txtPhone" maxlength="13"><br>
<input type="submit" value="Submit The Form">
</form>
</body>
</html>
Ok so we have our form set up and ready to go, obviously we are only using one form tag instead of the two in the above code, having commente out the unnecessary one (pretend, ok?
)
Now we need an ASP page to accept the form data and do something with it...
' Means we have to declare all variables in this script
' Lets declare some variables for name and phone
' Now we read the values from the previous page into our variables
Code:
userName = Request.Form("txtName")
userPhone = Request.Form("txtPhone")
' ***** Write them to the screen just to be nice
' escape the ASP block
' There are two ways to do this, but luckily we have two variables so can try both ways
' The first way is to write the html and variable and text from ASP using a Response.Write
Code:
Response.Write "Thank You " & userName & ", your submission is being processed.<br>"
%>
<!-- The second way is to write the html, but only insert the value of the ASP variable in the middle, like so: -->
Code:
<u>Your Phone Number: </u> <%=userPhone%> <br>
</body>
</html>
Now while I didn't actually handle the database work, you now have a form that can be emailed or set up on your webserver (depending on which form tag you use) that sends the data to this second page we just finished. The data is pulled into variables and all that is left is putting in into the db, for which there is a FAQ and lots of other resources. Hopefully this will get you startd.
-Tarwn --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
