FP98: How to Use Hidden Fields in a Form With FrontPage

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The Save Results Form Handler and the Registration Form Handler are both examples of form handlers. When a form is submitted in the browser, the values of each form field are passed to the form handler (specified by the action attribute of the <form> tag). For example, if your form field is a text box, the value sent to the form handler is the text entered in the text box.

The values of each of the form fields between the <form> and </form> tags will be sent to the form handler. Not all form fields are visible however. Some form fields are hidden. Even so you can assign values to these hidden form fields and pass the values to the form handler.

This can be especially useful when you have multiple forms saving results to a common e-mail address or results file. You could use a hidden field on each form that identifies the form by a unique number or name. The hidden fields in the form results would then indicate from which form the results came.

To create hidden fields in your forms, follow these steps.

1. Open the page that contains your form in the FrontPage Editor.
2. Right-click a form field and click Form Properties on the menu that appears.
3. In the Form Properties dialog box, click Advanced.
4. Click Add.
   
   
   1. In the Name box, type the name of the new hidden field.
   2. In the Value box, type the value to be sent to the form handler.
5. Click OK three times.
6. On the File menu, click Save.

Using Hidden Form Fields with the Registration Form Handler

You must take a few extra steps in order to save hidden fields using the Registration Form Handler:

1. Right-click the form and then click Form Properties on the menu that appears.
2. In the Form Properties dialog box, click Options.
3. Click the Saved Fields tab.
4. In the Form Fields To Save box, type the hidden fields you want to use.
5. Click Save All (saves all fields including hidden fields) or click OK.
6. Click OK in the Form Properties dialog box.

For additional information, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: