Creating Online Surveys Using FrontPage 2002

Building an Interactive Survey Form - Part One

Step25: To switch from saving the form to a simple Web page to storing results in an Microsoft Access database, click on the radio button Send to database as shown in Figure 15.

Figure 15 One Button Database Publishing feature in FrontPage.

Step 26: Next click on the Options button located at the bottom of the dialog box. This opens a second dialog box titled, Options for Saving Results to Database, as shown in Figure 16. Essentially, there are four options to select from in the screen. Since this tutorial is designed for non-programmers, we'll select the option to Create database.

Clicking the Create Database button creates a Access database with the same name as the survey form, in this case, mcptechsurvey.mdb. In addition, this database publishing process automatically creates a special folder called /FPDB, for storing the actual database, and initializes a database connection named mcptechsurvey. A database connection is a pointer to a database, not an actual database itself. But you need not concern yourself with this terminology, since it is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Figure 16 Options for Saving Results to Database screen.

Step 27: As part of any good Web authoring, you will want to test the page to make sure it functions properly. First, you can fill out each and every field with dummy data to ensure that each field behaves the way you intended it to function. Second, you can make certain that the form itself as a whole behaves properly when you hit the final submit button at the end of the form. And last, you can make sure that the form is collecting and storing the data as intended, either as a simple Web page or an Active Server Page feeding an Microsoft Access database. You must also monitor the form to make certain that it is functional once you publish it. Web pages can sometimes corrupt data either through a bad Internet connection or problem with the existing installation of FrontPage Server Extensions. If you suspect the latter, talk to your network administrator or ISP and have them reinstall them for you. This often clears up problems with faulty forms processing on FrontPage Web sites.

When we clicked on the Create Database button on the Options for Savings Results dialog box, we used the highly touted programming feature in FrontPage often referred to as One Button Database Publishing. This is an often overlooked feature that saves considerable time and energy when programming interactive Web pages.

That's it, we're done! In Part Two of Building an Interactive Survey Form I'll show you how to query and display the results from the survey database for publication on the IT Specialist Web site using the Database Results Wizard in FrontPage.