Asp script for email

1. INTRODUCTION

With the proliferation of e-commerce and the utilization of Internet technologies within public and private organizations, higher education faces a growing need to prepare students to work with these evolving technologies. Colleges and universities have responded by offering a variety of courses at various levels throughout the curriculum. The content of these courses ranges from augmenting an introductory course on computer productivity tools with an automatically generated web formatted document to senior and graduate level courses that address the full three-tier model of an e-commerce system. At each of these levels instructors attempt to develop a robust learning environment that includes enabling students to experience web site interactivity. This paper examines the most common methods of teaching HTML form functionality, which is used extensively in e-commerce applications to provide website interactivity. It also identifies the shortcomings of the common methods for demonstrating this interactive functionality. Following this analysis, a more effective operational solution to demonstrate this functionality is presented. This discussion assumes that the reader has a working knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in general and the FORM tag specifically.

For beginning HTML students, the tool outlined enables them to immediately see the results of the data acquisition and submission features of a correctly built form, just as it would be implemented in a real interactive web environment. For advanced web students, the tool enables them to determine that their form is submitting data as intended in the designed name-value pairs without having their server side processing (database, etc.) completely operational. Determining the data values provided by a form can be a very difficult problem to isolate during the development of advanced client server interactions.

2. BACKGROUND

One of the key benefits of the web environment is the ability to support interactive content. Because of this benefit, any course dealing with the development of a web site quickly advances to the stage of creating an interactive web environment. The first stage of web site interaction occurs when the web client sends a request for a new web page or a different URL to the web server. This action is very simple and achieved using the hyperlink anchor tag, .

The second stage of web site interaction occurs when the web user needs to send specific information to a program on the web server. The HTML form tag, , is the primary element that handles the interactive transfer of user information from the client to the server. While most HTML tags can be adequately demonstrated using only the browser on the client computer, the FORM tag requires an interaction with the Internet environment in order to fully demonstrate its functionality.

The FORM tag has two distinct operating phases: the presentation/data collection phase and the submission/processing phase. The first phase is handled entirely by the browser and its results are displayed in the browser window. The second phase, which is the reason for including forms in the web page, provides for collecting information from the user and submitting it to a non-HTML application for processing. These applications are normally stored on a server that is external to the client (e.g., an Active Server Page (ASP) database maintenance program).

3. COMMON METHODS

Introductory HTML courses and textbooks handle this second phase processing in a variety of ways. Some skirt this issue by stipulating that the processing is being handled by another organizational department and thus can be ignored by the developer/student. This approach is not very satisfactory for most instructional approaches since it does not provide the student with a complete understanding or appreciation of a form's purpose within a web site.

A more widely used approached is to use the "mailto" feature in the action attribute of the form. When the user submits a form with a mailto action, an email message is prepared and sent from the user to the designated email recipient. While this approach has some limited applicability in the "real world," and can therefore be marginally justified pedagogically, it has several significant operational deficiencies.

The most significant deficiency arises from an operational requirement of the "maito" action. Specifically, the web client machine must have a default email program that has been pre-configured for the specific user submitting the form. A large number, if not most, of the computers accessible to the general student population in open or dedicated labs have operating policies that purposely discourage personalized local email programs. The second deficiency of this approach arises from the time delay, often substantial, that occurs between the submission of the form and the availability of the delivered message for retrieval. The third deficiency results from the FORM tag requirement that the user provide an additional attribute, enctype="plain/text", in order to create a message with readable content. A simple example of a form that uses the mailto action is shown in Figures 1, 2 and 3.

4. ADVANCED METHODS

A better approach for demonstrating form interactivity is to create a server side program that will actually process the form submission and respond directly to the submitter. Some textbooks suggest that the instructor write or acquire such a program or have someone on their technical support staff write one (e.g., Groves, et al. 2000, p. 127-8; Morrison 2001, p. 102-3; Neou, 1999, p. 252-5). Unfortunately, many of the instructors teaching introductory client side scripting do not have the necessary knowledge to write or implement a program of this type and/or the technical staff is often unavailable to develop and support such a program. Figure 4 provides an example of a CGI/Perl script for such a program. However, while this program can run on both Unix and Windows based computers, it usually must be installed and maintained on the web server by the technical support staff.

5. ALTERNATIVE METHOD

Perhaps the best approach for demonstrating web site interactivity is the alternative offered by this paper. This approach uses a simple server side ASP program that responds directly and immediately to the form action request submitted by a web user/student. While this program may not be quite as universal as a CGI/Perl script, it will run on any Windows NT4 or 2000 server running the IIS web server and ASP 2.0 or higher. This configuration is widely used and available on most campuses. Further, this form responder script can be installed and maintained by the instructor using normal access to their web space. The single technical support input required for this program to work is that the web directory, where this ASP program is located, must be enabled to permit script execution. This script is then accessed by assigning the URL for the form responder script to the form action attribute. (Make sure the form responder script file is saved with an "asp" extension.) Figure 5 presents the basic processing script along with code that displays the results in a readable format.

This program reads and displays the names of the form fields exactly as they are encoded in the form. It then displays the associated value of each field that is submitted by the form for processing. There are no restrictions on the input names or input types (except that "file" input types may not be used) or on the number of inputs that may be submitted to the program. An example of the Form Responder output for the earlier example in Figure 1 is shown in Figure 6. This output was produced by changing the form action in that earlier script to point to the URL containing the FormResponder program (e.g., . This response to this action is immediate and, in fact, mimics the actual processing of a web server application. The student receives timely feedback to use in correcting any errors as well as gaining the experience of developing a workable interactive web page.