Programming with HTML Forms / Example 1: The Echoer: | WebReference

Programming with HTML Forms / Example 1: The Echoer:

Example 1: The Echoer

Programming with HTML Forms

Having described the HTML form constructs, the mechanism for supplying data to a form application, and the mechanism for generating a reply, it is now possible to describe a complete, very simple example. Its input document consists of a form with five single line text entry fields, which the application processes by outputting a HTML document containing the text entered in the fields. In other words, the user's input is echoed.

The input document is located at:

It will also be used as the interface to the file searcher application of the next section. However, ignoring the explanatory text, the form is quite simple: five text entry fields, and submit and reset buttons labelled as 'Start Search' and 'Clear' respectively.

The text field constructs include extra attributes to limit the size of the input, and the size of the boxes drawn on the screen. Also note that the fields are named pat1 through pat5, although these are not displayed as part of the input document.

When the input document is entered as in Figure 2 and the 'Start Search' button is clicked, the echoing application returns the document shown in Figure 3.

ALP Membership Search



Search Boxes


Figure 2: Example input

Query Result

You submitted the following name/value pairs:

Figure 3: Echoed input from Figure 2

In form-gp0.html, the name of the application is given in the FORM ACTION attribute as:

qgp's actual location on the server depends on the configuration file for the httpd daemon (called httpd.conf). The relevant line in that file is:

In other words, qgp must be placed in /local/dept/wwwd/scripts in order for the form to invoke it. This step in linking the input HTML document to the application varies from system to system.

qgp is the object file for qgp.c which can be found at:

The program mostly consists of utility functions for processing name=value substrings, which will, consequently, appear in almost every form application. Some of the functions were written by Rob McCool, and can be accessed via the page:

Also available from that page are similar utilities for writing applications in the Bourne Shell, Perl, and Tcl. Also included are several excellent small programs showing how the utilities can be used.

qgp begins by outputting the start of the reply document -- a HTML document in this case. The extra newlines in the printf()'s are not required, but make the output easier to read during debugging (see Part 7, 'A Note on Testing' for more on this).

cgi_errs() performs two standard error checks: the first determines whether the delivery METHOD is something other than POST. The second checks the encoding strategy for the name=value substrings. In fact, the only encoding supported by most browsers is x-www-form-urlencoded.

The call to build_entries() initializes the entries array with the name and value pairs sent to the application. The environment variable, CONTENT_LENGTH, contains the length of the string, which is used by the for-loop that builds the entries array. Each name=value substring is extracted by a call to fmakeword(). The +'s and hexadecimal URL encodings are replaced, and then the name part of the substring is removed, leaving only the value.

Finally, the contents of the entries array are output as an unnumbered HTML list.

Both cgi_errs() and build_entries() illustrate the importance of environment variables for conveying information from the input document to the application. A complete list of environment variables supported by the CGI specification can be found in:

Comments are welcome

Copyright 1996 Andrew Davison and Created: Apr. 26, 1996
Revised: May 7, 1996

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