Web Forms

[Calantha]

Hello there,

I have perused this section of the forum for answers to my ever-growing questions and just wanted to clarify some information and perhaps ask some additional questions regarding web forms.

What I want essentially is an FM based web form on our web page that allows a user to enter their personal information in order to request a brochure. The information would be automatically entered into the database.

Currently the person enters their information on a web form which sends an email to me, and I copy & paste the information into the database and discard the email.

I understand this is possible using IWP (which I don't really have any knowledge on it other than an old FMP4 book...).

Do you need a personal web server to achieve this?

Is it possible for someone to submit their information but not be able to view anyone elses information that has been submitted, so only their information shows? Is it possible to have a submit button which submits the information to a database but then clears the fields on the form?

And, is it that only 5 people can be viewing the database on the web at once? So if 5 people were filling out a form, the 6th would see nothing?

Thanks for all of your help!

[Reed]

IWP that is provided with FMP includes its own web server. this server is limited to 5 concurrent users. So the 6th user will get an error message and not see the database until one of the other users disconnects. If you use IWP with FM Server Advanced, you get 100 concurrent sessions. (You can have more users if you use CWP without sessions) FMSA uses IIS for a web server on windows for IWP, and Apache on the Mac.

In order to control which records users can see, they would have to have accounts on the database. If you enable guest access, users won't need a password, but they will all have the same privileges.

If you want a submission form that clears after submission, just create the form using global fields, and use a script to create the records and return to the cleared form without the user seeing.

[Garry Claridge]

Enter Name:

Enter Address:

[Garry Claridge]

I just noticed that you are referring to FM7 for this Post.

Without going all the way to purchase FM7 Server Advanced (very expensive), you can use either Cafephp or the POPit plugin. The POPit plugin receives the Form as an email and places, it in the right place, in your database.

All the best.

Garry

[Calantha]

Thanks for the information. It doesn't seem easy.

Has anyone used the Mail.it plugin? I can't seem to find out if you receive messages into it you can specify where particular fields would go.

Example: If my non-FM web form has First Name, Surname, Address, Email, Phone fields, I would like the information from the email be sorted into those fields within my database.

I read that the whole email can be placed in a field, but I want it separated.

Any info?

Thanks.

[Calantha]

Am I on the right track here?

Is this the right idea to use FM as a webform for an brochure request?

I merely want their information added to the database so that I don't have to copy & paste from an email, but I don't want to have any records showing on the web, just the form that submits the data.

Am I way off base?

[Reed]

For the email method, you would just have the non-FM web form send an email where the field values were in the body of the message separated by tabs, commas, etc. Then you could use grep or some text editor to concatenate all the emails into one file, and import the whole file into FM. If you use the mail.it or pop3.it plugin, you can set up filemaker to check the email account on a schedule, bringing the body into a temp field, and using a script to create a new record with the values.

Or you can make a submission form like I mentioned earlier and use it with IWP so users can submit directly.

[Calantha]

I might try that. Thank you for your help.