Aurora Generic Feedback System
The Aurora Generic Feedback System (AGFS) allows data providers to set up simple feedback forms which will e-mail user comments to a specified email address.
Creating Your Form
When creating a form to use the Aurora Generic Feedback System, a few simple rules must be followed.
- The form's action must be set to to script /cgi-bin/email-perl/generic-email. A sample form tag would look like:
<FORM method="post" action="/cgi-bin/email-bin/generic-email">
- There must be a hidden input form element whose name is sendTo and whose value is the email address that the form's reply should be sent to. For example:
<INPUT type="hidden" name="sendTo" value="jms20@po.cwru.edu">
- There may be up to four form elements in the form. The names and suggested purpose for each element are listed below. These elemets may be of any form type that returns a single value (such as text or radio).
- name
- The name of the person filling out the feedback form.
- e-mail
- The e-mail address of the the person filling out the form
- subject
- The subject of the message.
Suggestion: If you wish to have every message use the same subject (to make sorting incoming e-mail easier for example), consider using a hidden field for the subject; see the Example #3 below.
- comments
- The comment which the user enters; also the 'body' of the message which is mailed to the specified e-mail address.
AGFS Template
Below is the basic template for tha AGFS. You can copy this text into an HTML page and replace the words your_email_here with the email address which the comments should be sent to.
<FORM method="post" action="/cgi-bin/email-perl/generic-email">
<INPUT type="hidden" name="sendTo" value="your_email_here">
Your Name: <INPUT type="text" size=45 NAME="name"><br>
Your Email Address: <INPUT type="text" size=41 NAME="email"><br>
Subject: <INPUT type="text" size=47 NAME="subject"><br>
Comments:
<TEXTAREA wrap NAME="comments" ROWS=10 COLS=68></TEXTAREA> </p>
<INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Submit Message"> <INPUT TYPE="reset" VALUE="Reset Message">
</FORM>
You can place text, horizontal rules, images, or any HTML elements at all within the form. Similarly, you can rearrange the order the elements appear in, their labels, or anything except the element names. The names must be as they appear above.
Example Forms
These are some example forms that you can use to create your own feedback forms. To see the source, use your browser's VIEW SOURCE option.
Note: These forms are set up to use a different action that the forms you will want to write. Make sure if you copy these forms that you change the action to read as stated above.
- The AGFS Template
- A basic form where each element is a text area.
- A form which uses a hidden subject field.
- A form which uses other form elements.
- A form which uses the comment field as an address field.
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