Bonus Tutorial: How to Collect Addresses
From Your Web Site Visitors-

Configure The Form To Add Each New Address To Your Database - Step 3
With all my data fields configured, next I want to configure the form itself so that it will send the data it collects where I want it to go.

Now there is an easy way and a hard way to manage your data collected from a form. The easy way is to configure your form to deposit the data it collects into a simple text file that you periodically download for use on your PC. The hard way is to connect your form directly to a database that resides on your host server. You can achieve a great deal of automation by establishing a direct connection between your form and a database that resides on your host server, however this option requires special features in a host service plan that are not usually available in low-end (read, "inexpensive") host service alternatives. To learn more about the direct database connection option, I suggest you begin by visiting the FrontPage assistance center at:
http://search.office.microsoft.com/assistance/product.aspx?p=FrontPage

Remember, all we want to do is collect data entered by our visitors. We do not need to make the data available to them to edit now or later, nor do we want to establish a login system or create an ecommerce shopping cart system. For these kinds of interactive applications, the direct database connection approach is a terrific alternative you would be wise to consider. For our purposes though, I recommend the easy way and that is the method I will present here.

Form Configuration
To configure the form, simply right click in any form field or button, then choose, "Form Properties..." which will open the dialog box on the right.

Click "Options..." to open the next dialog box below.

Type into the box labeled "File name:" the name of the file you want to use to collect the form contents. If you leave off the path information and just type in the file name, as I have, the file will be created the first time the form is submitted by a visitor, and the file will be placed in the same directory of your Web site in which the form page resides. I chose the filename extension, ".txt" to help me identify my data file later on and to also simplify my later file management process once I have downloaded the file to my PC.

Form Properties

I recommend that you choose "Text database using tab as a separator" from the "File Format:" options. This option will work best for our current application.

Form Properties Options

Now I click the "E-mail Results" tab and enter my address to which I want the form data to be mailed each time a visitor fills out the form and submits it. This is not necessary, but I like to see what is happening as it does. It is pretty cool to see these messages loading into my email box every few minutes. When it gets annoying, just change the form parameters to just save the form results into the data file and not email them.

I do recommend that you use both when you are getting started. Then, when you make a mistake and lose the data in one place or the other, you can potentially recover it. If you put your data into a file and then you delete that file, the data may be gone for good.

Saving Form Results

Using the other two tabs, "Confirmation Page" and "Saved Fields" you can also choose which page you show your visitors when they submit the form data and select which form field data you save. Both these options are quite straightforward.

Form Properties

I now click "OK" and return to the first form properties dialog box, but this time I can see the file name and email address I entered above have been filled in as shown on the right.

One more "OK", save the page and I am ready to test my masterpiece.
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