Custom Web Forms

The archive browser interface supports custom forms that can be accessed from specific points.  These forms, when submitted, execute an UnForm job and provide that job with information from the form as well as the user's browser session and the CGI environment.  The UnForm job can perform tasks that might involve updating document properties on a selected or related document, or execute some other task related to a document.

When the job is run, it can be designed to return data to the browser, in the form of a PDF file or HTML text.  Optionally, the job can be run asynchronously and a configurable response message is returned instead.

The job must be designed to operate with no usable input stream.  If the job's output is to be returned to the browser, the first page of data will be replaced or suppressed by the job. Variables are provided to access information the user completed in the form, so typically the job will be designed with code blocks that interact with this data.

There are several related configuration steps for  setting up browser forms:

•HTML forms must be defined and stored in the server's active web/en-us or web/language directory.  The forms must have a .html extension.
 

•A rule file and rule set must be created, designed to act upon the data from the form.  This rule set will have access to some template variables: cgi$, env$, and session$, which are populated from the form and the user's session.
 

•The forms.ini file must be defined to enable users or groups to access forms designed for a given library and document type.