What are people using for html form generation? - html

There is a similar question from 2009 which mentions Wufoo and FormAssembly services. Are there any other services you would recommend for generating html forms?
I simply want to generate the code for the forms (some with a lot of fields) for my php application. I don't want a hosted solution or anything such as those mentioned above. What do you use for this tedious process?
Thanks.

You could check out Zend_Form. It generates HTML for you but you have to write quite a lot of php - with the reward of contained validation rules and decoration (container elements etc).
Or are you looking for a solution that let's you use a GUI to generate the form? In that case Wufoo seems like a good choice, I guess.

Just found what I was looking for. Must be newly indexed because it didn't turn up in my search the first time. In case anyone else is looking for something similar:
http://www.phpform.org/

Related

How can I pass form data from one html file to another without JS/PHP?

I'm learning basic web dev and started with HTML, CSS, Bootstrap. Haven't touched PHP or anything server side yet.
What I've done so far is I've created a pretty basic registration form with 5 fields and what I'm trying to do is display the input of those fields in a table that I've created on another page. The submit button has the "method" and action. Now, I've Googled a ton to find some solutions and have gone through most of the questions of this site but I still can't find out to achieve what I'm trying to do without the use of PHP/JS.
So, is it even possible to read form data from another page like this without the use of JS/PHP? If so, how do I proceed and what needs to be done? I can post the source code but I don't think it's going to help since there isn't much there, everything else is working fine except for finding a solution to this.
Thank you.
You need a programming language.
If you want to do it entirely client-side, then that has to be JS.
If you want to do it server-side (which allows you to access the data and, optionally, make it available to other people, instead of limiting it to the user of the browser) then you can use any programming language at all (although JS and PHP are among the most common choices).
Since you are trying to create a registration page, you'll need to use server-side programming.
You necessarily need to use JavaScript / PHP.
Since you are just starting, I would highly recommend you to check out the W3Schools tutorials on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Bootstrap and jQuery.
:)
So this is long gone but I was actually able to resolve my problem without using anything other than basic HTML , so here's how I did it for anyone else who's trying to find the answer to problem (probably not, you don't usually do this professionally and basically this was a challenge from a friend).
So, two things.
SessionStorage
LocalStorage
This is built-in to your browser and you can use it to achieve simple tasks by simply assigning values to it. They'll remain there and you can use however you want.
But, as the name implies, sessionstorage will only retain those values during the session (the time you have your browser open for) while localstorage can retain it indefinitely. Not sure if I can link other sites over here so just Google these terms to learn more and how to use them.

How can I secure user submitted HTML markup?

Before I start I'd like to say I have read similar questions here but I don't think it really answers the question: Show HTML user input, security issue and Security risks from user-submitted HTML
I think these highlight the problems quite well but I am essentially asking advice for best practice in these circumstances.
I have been programming for a while and have just now come to the point where I want website administrators to submit HTML markup to display the content they want in their own sites.
Securing this content in the database is fine but now I want to display it on the site securely.
Even though, this feature is only available to the site admins I still want to secure against malicious script injections and try to prevent them breaking the page by using poor HTML.
Is the reality that I cannot safely guard against script injections as the threads above seemed to point out?
Do I use the mentality that if they break the site, it's down to them, or can I use some sort of markup validator when they update the content?
What do you think about markdown?
It's a safe way to submit html, and have libraries to most popular languages.
You're correct, if you allow to submit pure HTML - there's no way to prevent all possible injections. Even if you disable <script> tag in all it's possible combinations (and there're many) there're other ways like onfocus onmouseover events that can be used to run malicious code.
I would advice HTMLPurifier, it's the best solution out there for sure. Google it!

What is the easiest way to add additional html to my form using the Orbeon Form Builder?

We want to use Orbeon Forms to build and run some forms, however these forms require some more explaining than is possible in the 'hint' or 'help' sections. ('hint' is supposed to be rather short, 'help' does not support any kind of formatting, as far as i can tell) Therefore, I'd like to put some HTML above or below some of the questions (controls).
Now, I know that there is an option that shows you the source and allows you to make changes. This is, however, quite complex for a non-technical person.
Is there a(nother) way of inserting pieces of HTML in a form?
Also, I have looked at ways of creating a control that outputs/shows HTML, however it seems that both XBL and the Java classes for XForms controls always assume that it should be bound to some variable that's also in the resulting XML document. (And I'd rather not have that, since it will just be clarifying text.) Though it could be that I overlooked another possible option in XBL or Java.
Is it possible to create a component that does not get bound to the XML instance? (That I can then use to create a control that provides HTML functionality.)
For HTML in help message, Form Builder supports form authors entering a help message as HTML since version 4.4.
We often get requests for a control allowing form authors to enter their own HTML from Form Builder, this isn't yet implemented, at the point of this writing, and we have an RFE (#507) to cover this.

How to repeat a menu without using iFrames or PHP in simple HTML/CSS or XML?

sorry for this ultimately newb question. I want to create a menu and not have to repeat the code of the menu on every single web page. I have done this with iframes in the past, but I know they aren't recommended. I have a pretty decent knowledge of HTML & CSS but I feel like I am missing something big here.
I am also not looking for the PHP solution which I believe is represented by:
<?php include("navigation.html"); ?>
Is there a good tutorial I can follow? I've heard this can be done with XML but I haven't been able to find what I am looking for exactly, and don't have any knowledge with it in the past.
In what I think is a related problem, I want to be able to place my google analytics code on just my index page and have it reference the entire website of pages, not just the index. Again, what am I missing here? Do I need to be using a content management system of some sort to pull off this slightly dynamic task? I don't think so...
Thanks for your help and please let me know if I can clarify my question any better!
Why don't you want to use PHP? It can be done with JavaScript (using AJAX), but you need to provide search engines with a way to crawl your site if you go that route.
Using includes in PHP to achieve this is simple and requires extremely little knowledge. Much easier and more efficient than doing it with JS. Also, I don't see how XML would be of any help here unless you read it in with JS (in which you'd have the same issue mentioned above.)
Use server side includes as mentioned already. They are support by pretty much all major webservers so php is not even required.
Check out the following articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html (from apache, note no php needed)
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/include.html
Good Luck
I'm not really sure what options you have other than a .php include. I'm not sure of why you would be avoiding PHP unless the server didn't support it, as it's very simple to do an include (you really don't even need to know PHP to do this except for the include statement).
For your analytics code, you could put this in a .js file and just include it on every page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="analytics.js"></script>
Hope this was at least slightly helpful.
How about javascript? You could write a Javascript file that is included on each page that you wish to display the menu. The javascript could read an XML that contains your menu items and generates HTML to display the menu.
Parse and XML document with JS
http://www.w3schools.com/Xml/xml_parser.asp
jQuery menu solutions
http://speckyboy.com/2010/12/01/15-super-simple-jquery-menu-and-navigation-plugins/

Removing HTML from user input in Perl and Catalyst

I'm using Catalyst for my Perl web app. What is the accepted way of removing HTML from user input?
Currently I'm leaning towards using HTML::FormatText. But it seems strange to me that I can't find a utility built into Catalyst to do this common task. Have I just not found it? Also, it seems these modules for removing input take like 5 lines of code. I was hoping for a simple "deHTMLify()" method. I guess I can roll my own but didn't want to reinvent the wheel.
I think the form validation modules like HTML::FormFU do this for you, but I am hoping to avoid that complexity. My forms are short and simple. Is this decision wrong headed?
Am I doing it right?
I'd argue you aren't doing it right. The right way to do this is to accept the text as sent from the server. Then to process all values received from the database with the html, or html_entities filter in your view (probably TT). Why is this the right way? Well, if you don't want to support HTML now, you can still hack the filter to make a subset of HTML work later on. This also lets the user see their input -- just escaped -- rather than having it stripped thereby losing track of what they sent and some potentially valuable information.
Your way also seems to make some assumptions about the output mechanism (HTML), that I'm uncomfortable with. Why would you want to sanitize on input for just one output format?
I'm using HTML::Scrubber, but that's where I want to actually allow a subset of elements/attributes.