CMPS 335 Advanced Web Publishing
Perl CGI Programming

Assignment 4 (Guest Book) -- Spring 2002

Primary Objective of the Project

• A guest book web page (HTML form)
• A CGI script to read from and write to an external data file

Forms are used to obtain data from visitors.  The data from these forms may be used in various ways, including the following:

• The data can be e-mailed to the form owner or any recipient.
• The data can be written to an external file and kept for permanent storage.
• the data can be retrieved at any time from the data file and displayed on a Web page.

For this assignment, create a guestbook system that handles the data in the above mentioned ways.  Follow the instructions below:

Part A -- A guestbook web page (HTML form)

Create an HTML document called guestbook.html to create a form for obtaining the visitor's information.  The form should contain at least the following elements:

• Input boxes
  For the last name, first name, title, street address, state, zip code, phone, and email address.
• A set of four radio buttons (age)
• A textarea box (for comments)
• A submit button
• A reset button

(Example of a guest book page)

Click Here for an example of adding guest book entries

Part B -- A CGI script for writing data to an external file

Create a CGI script called guestbook.cgi to transfer the visitor's information to an external data file called guestbook.dat.   Your CGI script should also generate a Thank You page similar to the one shown below:

Thank you for signing this guestbook
Ms Mary Anderson

Part C -- Displaying the guest book

Write a CGI script called displayGuestbook.cgi that can be used to read the data from guestbook.dat and display the entire guestbook on a Web page.

Click Here to display the guest book

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