The Default Form Handler

FrontPage automatically assigns its default form handler to a new form. The default form handler can save form information to a file in the current web, in the root web, or in your file system. It can also send form information to an e-mail address. You specify where to save form information in the Form Properties dialog box:

• To save form information to a file in the current web, specify the URL of the file relative to the top-level folder of the current web, as in _private/my_results.txt. This is done automatically by the default form handler.
  
  
• To save form information to a file in the root web, you must use the special folder _vti_log in the root web. Specify the URL of a file in this folder relative to the top-level folder of the current web, as in ../vti_log/my_results.txt.
  
  
• To save form information to a file in your file system, specify the complete path of the file, as in c:\my_results\results.txt.

  Can I save form information in any way that I want? No. Depending on the policy of your Internet service provider, you may not be able to save form information to a file system or to a FrontPage web. Ask your Internet service provider for file-saving guidelines.

The default form handler saves the information from your form as text with commas separating values. You can also save information in one of the following formats:

• HTML using normal text paragraphs with line endings.
  
  
• HTML using a definition list.
  
  
• HTML using a bulleted list.
  
  
• HTML using formatted text with line endings.
  
  
• Text formatted for easy reading.
  
  
• Text with tabs separating values.
  
  
• Text with space characters separating values.

To change the format of the results file, click Options in the Form Properties dialog box; this opens the Options for Saving Results of a Form dialog box. Then, in the File Format field of the File Results tab, select a new format. Saving form data to a text format is faster than saving to an HTML format.

The default form handler automatically generates a confirmation page that is displayed by a Web browser when a user has submitted the form. This page thanks the user for submitting the form and displays the data that was received. You can specify a different confirmation page in the Confirmation Page tab of the Options for Saving Results of Form dialog box. However, if you do this, you must create the confirmation page yourself, using FrontPage Confirmation Field components.

In the Saved Fields tab of the Options for Saving Results of Form dialog box, you can save specify additional information to save, such as the date and time the form was submitted, and the type of Web browser that was used to access the page. In the File Results tab, you can also specify an optional second file for saving the information from a form. This is useful if you want to generate one set of information in text format and another in HTML format.