Starting my web based Purchase order Application

[crimmelcp]

To All:
I am starting my web based Purchase order Application
I have my web components built
Login is working
All of the HTML is built.

Working on A5W pages.
Questions:
The HTML form of the Material Purchase Order is the exact form that the customer wants.
1. Can I import the HTML to a A5W page as a background
2. Can I just put text boxes for fields to capture some of the data?

Any examples
Thanks
Charlie Crimmel

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: Starting my web based Purchase order Application

Charlie,

Yes you can, but you may not be happy with the results. The reason is, as the screen size gets larger or smaller, and as label fields grow or shrink with th econtents, unless you are using absolute positioning, the fields will move around on the page, and may no longer line up with the background.

Pat

[crimmelcp]

Re: Starting my web based Purchase order Application

OK
Thanks Pat.
Then if the customer has a HTML form and that is the form that they require, then what is the best way to build that form into Alpha Web?

Charlie Crimmel

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: Starting my web based Purchase order Application

Charlie,

First, if they require the form, does that mean they require a printed out version? If so, then you can probably build a report that will look like the form they require and print that out, but Alpha components for input are not so accomodating, even if you do the whole thing in freeform.

You need to overlay the form with a tabular grid and try to figure out how to get each control in a cell. You can merge cells horizontally and vertically, but it's still going to be quite an exercise. I'm not sure it's worth the effort, so I'd just try to get them to accept something similar.


Pat

[Steve Wood]

Re: Starting my web based Purchase order Application

So don't rebuild it in Alpha. Just use it exactly as is, leave it as an HTML page, no changes EXCEPT, find the line that looks similar to this:

<form name="form1" action="myaction" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">

where "Action" would probably be an URL.

Change the action="myaction" to something like this:

action="formprocessor.a5w"

For starters, just include this code in that page (strip out all HTML):

<%a5
?request.raw
%>

When you enter information in the HTML form it will send the request to formprocessor.a5w and request.raw will display all of the variables and their values. This gets you started; by knowing what the form is sending, you can write code to process the data.

Then go to my website and view video#4 - How to post any web-based form data to an Alpha Five database. Follow the suggestions in the video.

So you can keep their form as is, but send the data to Alpha for processing.

If that doen't work you can "maybe" copy-paste the HTML form exaclty as is, into the Freeform area of a dialog. But that is a significant amount of work and whether you get a good rendition depends on the sophistication of their existing form.