Section 55. Send Form Data Through the Web

55. Send Form Data Through the Web

Before You Begin

36 Create a Custom Button

47 About PDF Forms

54 Create a Form in Acrobat

KEY TERM

CGI applications Small applications that run on web servers. They perform a variety of tasks , including accepting incoming data and storing it in database form.

With Acrobat PDF forms, you can collect data through the Web by either sending it to an online database or a specified email address. To send data to a web server, you need to have a CGI application on the server. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) application collects the data sent from the form and populates a database on that server. Sending data to an email address is much easier because no database setup or CGI application creation is required. You can send either just the data itself or the entire form as an attachment to the email.

1.

Select a Form and Create a Button In Acrobat, open the PDF file you will be using as your form. Insert text fields, check boxes, and other interactive fields as necessary. From the Tools menu, under the Advanced Editing submenu, select the Button tool. Position your cursor at the desired location and click and drag to create the button. The Button Properties dialog box appears. Under the General tab, enter the name of your button. You can also set a ToolTip, which is a brief text message of your choice, typically used to describe what the button does when clicked. You can change the appearance of your button, such as border color or borderless, fill color , text size , font color, and font, on the Appearance tab. You can also change the layout of the button on the Options tab. You can choose to have text only on your button, an image only, or a combination of both. Behavior selections include Invert , which inverts the button; Push , which gives the button the illusion of being pressed down when clicked; Outline , which outlines the button in a different color when clicked; and None , which results in no visible animation of the button when it's clicked.

2.

Set an Action To select the action for your form, click the Actions tab on the Button Properties dialog box. Select Submit a Form from the Select Action drop-down menu. Click the Add button to bring up the Submit Form Selections dialog box. If you are sending the form data to a particular email address, enter mailto: followed by the specified email address in the Enter a URL for This Link box. For example, enter mailto:[e-mail] . If you are sending the form data to a web server, enter the URL address in the Enter a URL for This Link box. The CGI script located on the server will know how to interpret the data being sent and populate the database. Make sure the field names match both on the form and the database to ensure the data is properly captured.