Form Testing Made Easy

[david_de]

I have several large forms and filling them out when testing gets old fast. I get to the point I dread filling in all those fields. There is a Firefox plugin Web Developer 1.0.2 that does a lot of great things if you develope websites. One of those is a forms section with a lot of handy form tools. One of these propogates forms. Go to your form online, select the forms tab, select propogate tab and submit the form. Every field is filled in.

[russellr]

Hi,

Thanks for the tip.

If you're JavaScript-savvy, I often use it for populating forms for testing:

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
function TestData()
{
    document.form.name.value = "Russell Robinson"
    document.form.emailaddr.value = "myemail@tectite.com"
    document.form.lab.value = "Monbulk Lab"
    document.form.labnum.value = 999
    document.form.zscore.value = 999
    document.form.sampnum.value = "05-01"

    document.form.ts02m.value = "Aspiration"
    document.form.ts02a.value = 1
    document.form.ts02b.value = 2
}
TestData();   // comment this out for production
// -->
</script>

BTW, the above probably needs tweaking for FireFox.

[kdeguero]

this was great! thank you for posting it
I have some extensive forms and this made testing the templates and mail results cake

[tavhank01]

Hi. I have a contact form page located at http://www.aikenhorsepower.com/contact_us.html. I have the form set up with validation of certain fields and I have a thank you page created named thank_you_contact.asp, but it isn't working. I am trying to find out what I am doing wrong or what. The return email is aikenhorsepower@bellsouth.net and I am trying to get all the email to go to this address. I hope someone can help me. Thanks.

[david_de]

I have not had to work on my forms much in a long time but I will pass on some of what little I do know.

I am not sure why you have formmail.php named formmail.cgi and have it in your cgi bin. I know some do but others have confused this PHP version of Formmail with the CGI one they are not the same.

Did you set up your form to send you error messages and if so what were the messages? That is an esential part of troubleshooting. You will also get any information the person put in the form before it failed, this can be helpful to contact them as well as see what went wrong.

The email address to send these to as well as the address that the form is allowed to send to like @yourdomain.com would allow email to be sent to any address at yourdomain.com. You will probably want to look into hiding your actual email address better too but that can be worked on after you get the form working.

One fellow put together a great step by step guid it can be found at http://www.tectite.com/terry_allen_guide/web-content/index.html

Try to follow that step by step. I hope some of this will help get you going until someone with more knowledge gets on.

It is usually best to start simple. Use the sample form and get it working with the basics then go on from there. Build on it until everything is working then just cut and paste the content you want into it. You will need to make templates for the thank you page you can make templates for the email, and error page. For the email and thank you I strip the form from the original and insert string names for the contents example $name will fill with the contents of the form field "name"

Work on it and keep asking questions if you have any. So far nobody on this form was born knowing all this stuff. Well maybe Russell but nobody else.

[CHMOD000]

Hi,

Thanks for the tip.

If you're JavaScript-savvy, I often use it for populating forms for testing:

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
function TestData()
{
    document.form.name.value = "Russell Robinson"
    document.form.emailaddr.value = "myemail@tectite.com"
    document.form.lab.value = "Monbulk Lab"
    document.form.labnum.value = 999
    document.form.zscore.value = 999
    document.form.sampnum.value = "05-01"

    document.form.ts02m.value = "Aspiration"
    document.form.ts02a.value = 1
    document.form.ts02b.value = 2
}
TestData();   // comment this out for production
// -->
</script>

BTW, the above probably needs tweaking for FireFox.

I had never seen this before, but this is a great idea! Whatever saves time saves money!

[Lodloder]

Hi,
Thanks David_de for your post. This is awesome and nice. Your information will be helpful for me.

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[david_de]

Glad you found it usefull. I posted that a long time ago but I still use it from time to time myself.