Some Background on Web Based Interactions with a User

 

Introduction.  We started developing a Login.asp, though it wasn't at all useful since we still don't know how to get information from a user and use that in an ASP.  There are many other reasons to collect information from a user.  Maybe they want to search your web, or maybe you want some basic information about them in order to send them something.  This can get even more elaborate if you are trying to set up an online store where you need to accumulate order, shipping and billing information at the very least.

Remember the QUESBMI situation we have partly described.  Remember QUESBMI has been sending out forms and they would like to be able to do much of their information gathering on the web.  While not everyone has access to the web, it still is a functional approach for improving their accessibility and ease of information collection.  While they do not need a complete online store, there are still a number of features that will require some expertise in order to be implemented.

These sorts of issues need to be determined during the analysis and design phases of your project.  As you'd expect, thoroughness during these phases can definitely make the development and coding much easier.

The basis of these web based user interactions will be done through HTML using the <FORM> </FORM> tag pair.  These sorts of pages are called forms.  They are not unlike Visual Basic forms. in VB.  Once our form pages get more complicated we will definitely move to some WYSIWYG environment.

What's Needed for the Login.ASP?   Think about what you need to develop in order to have some sort of web page come up so that only people that have the correct password can link to other pages within the web.

 

Requirement Identifier/Name
A page that a potential user of your web will need to access in order to submit a password. form creation page
A page associated with the script that will process and determine the validity of the password and provide a welcome to members. form processing script page
A page associated with handling mistakes in data entry or invalid responses redirect page

 

In general, these basic requirements recur all the time so we will generalize these basic notions in the next table.

 

Identifier/Name Description
form creation page This is the HTML or ASP page created to display the form with which the user will interact.
form processing script page This is the ASP page created to collect what the user inputted into the form fields.  This ASP is also responsible for processing the input information and determining what should happen next.
redirect page This is an HTML or ASP page associated with handling mistakes in data entry or invalid or incorrect responses.

 

 

The next thing we will do is develop some background about developing web forms using HTML.  Then after that we will get back to our major issue of collecting information from the user.