A tool for form generation, checking, storing and retrieving

Jens Kurlanda, Schwarzburgstraße 40, D - 60318 Frankfurt (Germany)

kurlanda@rbi.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de, http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/rbi/personal/JK.html

Felix Gaehtgens, Jordanstrasse, D - 60486 Frankfurt (Germany)

felix@echo.lu

Keywords:

FORM, forms generation, tool

Description:

We developed a tool for generating, analysing, checking, retrieving and storing forms and form submissions. It was implemented in PERL5.

The forms are described by a simple form description language. Based on that description it is possible to

generate the approbiate HTML - code for a blank form embedded in a skeleton HTML page.
analysing an incoming form submission and optionaly check the fields
- weather they are populated
- In case of <INPUT> and <TEXTAREA> tags
  - against a perl regular expression
- In case of a <TEXTAREA> tag
  - weather they do not exceed a certain length
- In case of a <SELECT> tag
  - weather the number of selected items is in a certain range
store the submitted contents in a file or database
retrieve and display a specified record from a file or database

The tool is easy to use and easy to extend, because it was written in PERL5 making heavy use of its slightly object oriented features.