9.3 Generating HTML Forms

Forms permeate Web applications, and Vortex was designed with this in mind.

Lists

As we've seen, the list nature of Vortex variables lends itself to form management.

Automatic import

Vortex variables are automatically imported from form variables of the same name; no init call is needed.

Automatic HTML escapement

On output, Vortex variables are automatically HTML-escaped, obviating the need for text-variable escapement.

Vortex also has some functions to make generating forms easier.

• <options>
  The <options> function, as we used in the Variable nbsp;Values section, automatically generates a list of <OPTION> tags for a <SELECT> box.

• <checkbox>
  This generates a list of <INPUT nbsp;TYPE=checkbox> boxes. As with <options> , certain boxes can be pre-selected from a variable.

• <radiobutton>
  The <radiobutton> function does the same for radio buttons.

Image maps

Since periods are valid variable name characters, server-side image map coordinates can be obtained directly from the form variables (eg. $map.x / $map.y ).

File uploads

Vortex also automatically imports variables from form-based file uploads - forms with ENCTYPE=multipart/form-data . This makes uploading of files and images directly into Vortex variables easy. We'll discuss this in the section on Multi-part nbsp;File nbsp;Uploads .

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