Plan the contact form

Before you start building this application, make sure you have a correctly configured Dreamweaver site, and a working database connection. For more instructions regarding these actions, consult the Getting started help file, which can be found in Help -> InterAKT -> Getting Started.

You will only have to create two files in your site's root. You can create them at the very beginning, so that you will not waste time with this operation again. To create files and folders in the site's root, use the corresponding options in the File menu of the Files tab. The file structure will look as in the example below, and you can create it easily by unpacking the zip file corresponding to your server model from \tutorials\Contact Form\ in your site root:
 

The index of your site will display the contact form and perform most of the actions, while the thankyou.html page is only used to show a message to visitors that submit their messages.

After having created the files for your pages, it is time to set up the database to store the information for display. For this tutorial, you will use two tables: one for the departments, and one for the visitor's messages. The tables and fields are shown below:

Note: The database diagram in the image above was built with MX Query Builder (also referred as QuB) to better illustrate the database structure. You do not need to build it in order to complete this tutorial.

Here's a listing of the tables and columns used in this database:

1. department_dep - stores the departments information.
   · id_dep - the primary key for the department table. No two departments will have the same ID.
   · name_dep - the department name (Sales, IT).
   · email_dep - this field stores the email address of the department, (sales@interaktonline.com).

2. contact_con - the contact table stores a list of contents for each department. It is linked to the department table by the id_dep_con foreign key, which stores the ID of the department associated to each contact record.
   · id_con - the primary key for the contact table. No two contacts will have the same ID.
   · id_dep_con - the foreign key to the department table. This field stores the same value as id_dep.
   · name_con - the name of the contact (Rob Anderson, Dan Smith).
   · email_con - the contact's email address (rob_anderson@somedomain.org).
   · phone_con - the contact's phone number.
   · address_con - address of each contact.
   · preferred_con - here the preferred means of contact is stored (phone, email, postal mail).
   · message_con - this field stores the content of the email message.

You can find the scripts needed to create an identical table structure inside the downloaded package, in the \tutorials\Contact Form\db\ folder, as an sql or mdb file, depending on the database server you intend to use. Import them in your database server management software (e.g. PHPMyAdmin, Microsoft Access etc.).

Once you have created the index of your site, open it, and if you haven't already, create a database connection to the tables you've just created. Throughout this tutorial, the connection used will be called connForm. Having completed all of the prerequisites, it is time to move on and start building your application.