Summary

In this chapter, we first covered HTML forms and then we practiced making forms. We focused on the importance of the <FORM> tag's ACTION attribute, and the <INPUT> tag's NAME attribute. Once the user has submitted the form (by clicking the special SUBMIT button in the form), the browser submits the user's information to the web server, along with a request for a new web page (specified by the ACTION attribute).

In the new web page, we can access the submitted information using the Request.Form("field_name") syntax. One of the things we can do with that syntax is use it to assign the assocated value to a local variable in the page, like this:

strName = Request.Form("field_name")

Finally, we talked about using the Response.Write "Text" syntax to get ASP code to write text onto an HTML page that's being sent out to the browser.

And we looked at the powerful technique of writing the contents of a variable onto the page, using the syntax Response.Write strName or simply <%=strName%>. This is a crucially important technique in ASP, which we will use to dynamically add content to our pages many times in this book.

We haven't included much detail about the theory, logic or exceptions to these ASP techniques – all that will come in the remaining chapters. But at least now you have some basic tools that allow you to:

• Create an ASP page
• Get some information from the user
• Retrieve the submitted information, and store it in a variable
• Write the submitted information back to the browser within a subsequent ASP page

Now, as my professor of Chinese told me, you are ready to begin your study.