Creating a simple visitor Registration Form...

[PixelDiva]

Here's what I want to do:
I want users to fill out a form with their name, email, and choose their course from a list. When they hit 'submit', the information goes to a database that stores that data that I can access.

Reasoning:
I want to be able to email my students based on the course that they are taking.

Here's what I have:
From my hosting, I have the ability to create a mySQL database. So right now, I have a database created with a username.

How do I use Dreamweaver to connect a make this happen?

Thanks!

[TORCH511]

I am going to assume that you have a MySQL database, as opposed to an SQL, there is a slight difference.

There are different ways to handle this depending on which web language you will be using. For something like this PHP is quite common but not the only way.

Basically you will need a web page that contains the form, and you will need another web page that handles the form. Creating the form is a lot easier than creating the form but neither is all that difficult. For each bit of information you would create an input field on your form, and on the handler page, you would write an SQL query that would insert each value into the corresponding field in the database. You would want to make sure that your database table has fields for all the values. For example User ID (which will be a unique number) First Name, Last Name and Course.

There are LOTS of Php tutorials on creating a form and updating a database online. I would do a good search for one and see if you can follow it. Once you learn how to do this for one bit of information, you can pretty much copy and repeat.

If you get really stuck and can't find a good tutorial, let me know and I will post up some code for you. I was going to do it origianlly since I can whip this out in about 5 minutes, but I wanted you to try and figure it out on your own, a little more learning value that way.

[PixelDiva]

You have given me a bit of clarity to my task. I now have a better sense of what to search for. I will post with my findings and updates.

[alcbevtesting@alltel.net]

Adobe Life Cycle (comes free with Acrobat) is a neat way to create interactive forms with either WISIWIG or added code features. I have tried it once following a brief set of tuts at Lynda.com.

I don't think a lot of folks know it is there but might be worth a look at if you have it. Then you can deal with how to post it to your website or just send to students as an interactive PDF? It can collect data upon returned form submission but I am not sure how it does all that.

Just another app and a few of my thoughts.

[TORCH511]

That would work well if you wanted to email the results, but you need the Livecycle server (cost is huge) to connect to databases and AS400 systems.

Webforms are fairly straightforward. And even if you include data validation, redundancy checks and whatnot it still does not take too long.

[alcbevtesting@alltel.net]

aha! Knew there had to be a catch somewhere since Lifecycle comes free with Acrobat.

Still looks useful for generating forms that can be E-mailed and returned if not actually sent and collated in n expensive database server.