Operation Manual

624
USING DREAMWEAVER
Building forms
Last updated 3/28/2012
In cases where a web application expects a precise parameter value (for example, when it performs an action based on
one of several options), use a radio button, check box, or list/menu form object to control the values the user can
submit. This prevents users from typing information incorrectly and causing an application error. The following
example depicts a pop-up menu form offering three choices:
Each menu choice corresponds to a hard-coded value that is submitted as a form parameter to the server. The List
Values dialog box in the following example matches each list item to a value (Add, Update, or Delete):
After a form parameter is created, Dreamweaver can retrieve the value and use it in a web application. After defining
the form parameter in Dreamweaver, you can insert its value within a page.
More Help topics
“Creating web forms” on page 626
“Adding dynamic content to pages” on page 549
“Accessing a database” on page 500
URL parameters
URL parameters let you pass user-supplied information from the browser to the server. When a server receives a
request and parameters are appended to the URL of the request, the server gives the requested page access to the
parameters before serving that page to the browser.
A URL parameter is a name-value pair appended to a URL. The parameter begins with a question mark (?) and takes
the form
name=value. If more than one URL parameter exists, each parameter is separated by an ampersand (&). The
following example shows a URL parameter with two name-value pairs:
http://server/path/document?name1=value1&name2=value2