Formatted Emails using eform.cgi

To have your emails from eform.cgi formatted, you have to do just two extra steps:

1. Create a template file using TextWrangler or BBEdit or Notepad. This is just a plain text file (like an HTML file or an email message) except that there are marked places for the values of the inputs to be put in. Here's an example:

   The person's name is %%NAME and their age is %%AGE ...
   

   The double percent sign marks a place where an input will be substituted and it's followed by the name of the input. Of course, this template would only make sense for a form with inputs named NAME and AGE. (The matching is not case sensitive.)

2. Add another hidden input to the form to specify the name and location of the template file. This is a relative pathname (like a relative URL, but on the same server, so we don't need anything except the directories and filename). If the template is in the same directory as the form (the usual case), all you need to do is give its name, such as:

   <input type="hidden" 
          name="template" 
          value="my_template.txt">
   

Here's a version of the example form using this template.

Here is the solution to Exercise 2

Unused Parameters

Using the template feature opens you up to a new set of possible errors. This section discusses what some of them are and possible causes and cures.

You may get an error message that says:

Error: Unused parameters

The following parameters were in your form, but were not used by the template file:

input 1	value 1
input 2	value 2

This happens when you're using a template file and eform.cgi thinks your template file is incomplete: it's not using up all the inputs. The purpose of this is so that the form author doesn't accidentally forget some important data. The error can be caused by several things:

• You're actually not using all the inputs. If you have a named inputs "first_name" and "last_name", the template file has to have both "%%first_name" and "%%last_name" or eform.cgi will be unhappy. Check this first.
• You may have named inputs that you have no intention of using in your template. For example, many times people get in the habit of naming all their inputs, including, say, the submit button. Because the submit button has both a name and a value, those get submitted along with the form data, and then eform.cgi wants to put them in the template. If you don't want the data, just omit the name in the form.
• One of your input names is a prefix of another. (This error is actually a bug in eform.cgi that is difficult to fix because the solution causes all old forms to stop working.) Suppose you have several inputs named "user," "usercity," "userstate," and "userzip." This is perfectly reasonable, but the first is a prefix of all the others, so that when all the "%%user" variables are replaced with form data (say "Fred"), all the other template variables become "fredcity," "fredstate," and "fredzip." That means that when eform.cgi tries to use the "usercity" data, there are not template variables to put it in, and the error is reported.

  The solution to this is to name your inputs without the prefix property. For example, you could name the first input above "username" and the error would be avoided.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Date Modified: Wednesday, 24-Jan-2007 01:27:13 EST