ARCHIVED: Create a form on Webserve

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.
Note:

Due to the evolving coronavirus situation, the retirement of Webserve was delayed until April 16 to allow classes that reference sites on Webserve to continue with minimal disruption.

All remaining Webserve sites were disabled beginning April 16, along with login access to webserve.iu.edu. If you have websites that still need to be moved to IU Sitehosting, you should migrate immediately.

Note:
Transform will not be available on IU Sitehosting. If you are using Transform on Webserve, you will need to find another utility for processing HTML forms on IU Sitehosting.

For information about using HTML to create a web form, consult any good HTML reference book or one of the many HTML tutorials on the web. At Indiana University, you can also explore web development training from UITS IT Training. Alternately, you can use an HTML editing program such as Dreamweaver to create forms. However, not all of the features of such programs are supported on IU's central web server, Webserve.

Once you have created the HTML page containing your form, you can use one of several methods to have the web server process it. If you have an account on Webserve (www.indiana.edu, www.iub.edu, www.iupui.edu, www.iun.edu, www.iue.edu, or www.iuk.edu), you can use the form-handling software Transform. This tool makes it unnecessary to write your own Perl or CGI script, and offers a number of features that enable you to customize your output and handle the data collected by the form. Web Services Support maintains the following helpful documents:

You can also write your own CGI or Perl script to handle the action for your form. For instructions, see About forms and CGI scripts on IU's web server.

You may also be able to create a form and use a mailto: form action statement, although this may not work well with all browsers.