The Information Systems (IS) Group of the College of Engineering provides web form development and hosting to members of college faculty and staff. The definition of a web form within this context is a single web page that collects data and saves this data to a database table on submission.

Web form development proceeds as follows; the sponsor/owner of the form creates, or "paints", the form in HTML. The form is then turned over to the IS which runs an automated procedure (application) that interrogates the form to discover form tags such as text boxes, drop down selection items, radio buttons, etc. These form tags are used by the application to develop a database table that will record information submitted by the from. The application then rewrites the HTML page in Microsoft .ASP format and adds other processing to the form such as authentication (login), data validation (numbers are numbers), persistence (edit of previously submitted data), application of an expiration date (if sponsor so indicates) and error reporting, so that IS staff are alerted by malfunctioning code.

This process has been used to develop hundreds of web-based data collection forms, which typically fall into two groups, ballots and surveys.

Ballots, such as Graduate Council Election and Promotion and Tenure Election have been used for approximately four years greatly streamlining the distribution, collection and tabulation of ballots. Ballots are not totally anonymous due to the fact that authenticaion must take place to ensure that data is submitted only by those people who are eligible to vote. HOWEVER, anonimity is provided during tabulation of ballots by stripping any information that can be used to identify individual respondents.

Surveys are very similar to ballots, they differ in that surveys usually collect more information in more diverse formats (tags). AGAIN, anonimity is preserved when survey information is tabulated or analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean, stddev., etc.).

** IMPORTANT INFORMATION **
Software specifically designed to edit HTML such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage should be used to create forms; Microsoft Word and other packages that create HTML as a seconday capability usually imbed so much additional information if web forms that the forms become difficulty to read and, at times, create problems for the application that interrogates the form. Notepad would be the ideal editor, but notepad requires a complete understanding of HTML and the ability to format HTML properly.

DreamWeaver is the preferred editing package, followed by FrontPage and others.

Click here to lean how to create a data collection web form.