CMPS 491 Advanced Web Publishing
JavaScript Programming

Assignment 8, Spring 2002
Form Validation with JavaScript (Emailing Form Data)

Primary Objectives of the Assignment
 

• To check the validility of a name box
• To check the validility of a password
• To check the validility of an e-mail address
• To check the selection of a radio button
• To check the selection of a drop-down menu item

One of the most useful purposes of JavaScript is to validate users' form data before the data is sent to Web servers for processing.  This validation is necessary not only to eliminate blank fields but also to ensure that the data is in the correct format.  Validating form data at the client-side with JavaScript is both faster and more efficient than the validating form data at the server-side with CGI scripts.  For this assignment, do the following:

Part A -- Creating a Survey Form (HTML Document)

Create an HTML document to generate a survey form that contains the following form elements:
 

• Four input boxes
  (one for the visitor's name, two for password verification, and one for an email address)
• Two radio buttons (for male and female)
• A pull-down menu (for age groups)
• A textarea (for comments)
• A submit button
• A reset button

Use JavaScript scripts to perform the following:
 

1. Verify that all input boxes are properly entered.  In particular,
   1. make sure that the e-mail address does not contain the following
      invalid characters:  space, slash, comma, semicolon, and colon  (  /,;:),
   2. make sure the email address contains only one @ symbol, and
   3. make sure that the e-mail address contains a period (.) after the @ symbol.
2. Ensure that a radio button is selected.
3. Ensure that a drop-down menu itm is selected.

Note:  In this assignment, checking the validity of the user password is simple.  Simply make sure that when a password is entered twice, the password entered is identical for both entries.   There is no need to write a Perl CGI on the server that checks the master password database.

Part B -- Creating a CGI Script for Emailing Form Data

The address of the sendmail program on our Web server is: /usr/sbin/sendmail.  Your CGI script should open a pipe to re-direct the output of the script to the sendmail program..  Your script also needs to specify the recipient of the email.  The recipient should be your email address for this assignment.  These things can be accomplished by the following statements:

#!/usr/bin/perl
require "subroutines.lib";
&Parse_Form;

$recipient = 'yourEmailAddress';
 :

Finally, your script generates a Thank You page to acknowledge receipt of the survey.  On this Thank You page, your script should also display the survey data.
Click Here for an example of this assignment

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