Add a User

This lesson introduces the form manager component of the publishing system, which generates templated forms and handles validation and database transactions for form submissions. The objective of this lesson is to create a simple form to add a user to the list of sample users. Subsequent lessons will expand on this example to illustrate other features of the form manager.

Create the form specification

A form specification is a simple XML document that uses a standard set of tags to describe a form and its individual elements.

Create a file named user-add.form in a test directory of your server and enter the following specification:

As this example shows, a form specification consists of some general properties followed by any number of form elements. In particular pleas note:

• The dbaction element is set to insert.
• Each element maps to a column in the database table ad_template_sample_users. The column name is assumed to be the same as the element name. The datamap container also has an optional column attribute that may be used with the name of the form element and column are different. The user_id element is marked as a "parent" key, since it is the primary key for the table.
• The hidden form element user_id has a default value that is set based on a database query.
• All elements except for user_id use the default widget, which is a text input box. They are also of the default data type, which is text.
• The city and state elements are marked as optional. They may be left blank by the user. The other elements by default are expected to be required.
• The state element has an additional attribute attribute. This may be used to add arbritary additional attributes to the input or select tag, such as the maxlength attribute or JavaScript event handlers, which may be used for presubmission validation.

Create the form template

To embed the form into any page using a standard form template, you can use the formtemplate tag to autogenerate the form using a standard sitewide template: