Adding parts to a form
To add a part to a form, place the part within the rectangle that defines the form's boundary. You can place any Web Connection visual part inside a form, except for another form or page. Parts within a form observe the same flowed layout as parts outside a form. To see a visual indicator of where a part will go, hold down the mouse button as you move the loaded pointer over the Page. When you release the mouse pointer, the part is placed in the indicated location.
The form parts represent different user-interface controls, and generally, they function similarly to the corresponding standard VA Smalltalk parts. However, there are some differences in the way the Web Connection parts work, and different browsers might display them differently as well.
Most of the form parts represent data entry controls, which enable users of the application to select items or type information in fields. These parts work in essentially the same way as the corresponding base VA Smalltalk parts. When the user submits the form data for processing, each data entry part provides a single value, based upon the user's input. Because of the nature of the Web, these values are string-based.
Adding push buttons
Although most of the form parts are similar to their base VA Smalltalk counterparts, the Push Button part is a special case. Within a Form, there are several basic kinds of push buttons:
submit
A submit button executes the action defined for the form: it connects to the specified server program, passing in the data from all of the fields in the form. Typically, each form should have at least one submit button. You can put multiple submit buttons on the same form, but they all perform the same action; it is up to the server program to determine which button was pressed and to process the input fields accordingly.
reset
A reset button clears any information entered by the user and restores the fields to their default values. A reset button does not open a connection to the server.
image
An image button is a custom button that uses an image as the linked, or clickable, area. Image buttons behave similar to a submit button, but they appear different when you specify an image.
button
A button type of push button provides an object that the user can click but does not submit the action to the server or reset the form. Use this type of push button to trigger execution of client side scripts, for example.
In the settings of a Push Button part, you can specify whether the push button is a submit button or a reset button. When first created at edit time, a submit button has the default label Submit, and a reset button has the default label Reset. You can change these labels by specifying a new label in the settings for the part or by directly editing the label.
Note:
The default labels Submit and Reset are edit-time defaults only. At run time, the default labels for submit and reset buttons are determined by the browser. If you want to be sure of the label on a push button, explicitly define it in the settings.
Last modified date: 01/29/2015