My form is designed as an email contact form but at the moment because i dont have a local mail server configured im using the fwrite functions in PHP to illustrate that it works and to save the values of the variables to a text file to prove they are working, if it comes to rolling it out then i can use the mail function just by editting the PHP.
CODE
<mx:HTTPService
id="sendmycontact"
url="contact.php"
result="resulthandler(event)"
resultFormat="text"
method="POST"
>
id="sendmycontact"
url="contact.php"
result="resulthandler(event)"
resultFormat="text"
method="POST"
>
First of course there is the HTTPService tag. Basically similar (as far as i can tell) to the <form> HTML tag. You specify the URL which is the "action" of a <form> and then of course the method, POST, GET and others i cant remember! all you need for a very basic form is the URL and the action parts and of course the ID which is used later to submit it. The interesting part is the "result" property. This is a property that defines what to do if/when the form receives an answer from the script, in my example i used the php: or die("failed") to provide feedback to the flex form. It automatically receives the text "failed" if the PHP encounters an error (for example your mail server dies and your user thinks a message has been sent but it hasnt. The error handler will notify the user of an error). In my example i created a function that i will explain in a sec, that takes the value of 'event' which will contain the text from my php file. So if my PHP die statement was: or die("no luck"); then the resulthandler(event) would pass on the value "no luck" to my function. You also need to specify the format of the result. In this case it is text. You can also use XML feedback for moe complex things like database functions. Anyway....
The next part is this:
CODE
<mx:request xmlns="">
<name>{fname.text}</name>
<email>{email.text}</email>
<message>{message.text}</message>
</mx:request>
</mx:HTTPService>
<name>{fname.text}</name>
<email>{email.text}</email>
<message>{message.text}</message>
</mx:request>
</mx:HTTPService>
This basically sets the data to be transmitted to the URL specified in the first code block. In my example i have the users name, email address and their message. Basically my PHP code receives a variable named "name" containing the data from the fname text input box (this is set by the code: {fname.text} ) Now as you notice this code comes WITHIN the mx:HTTPService tag which is now ended after the mx:request tag. AS far as i know the xmlns property doesnt need to be filled in. I may be wrong but it works so far!
Now we need to define our functions that submit the form and process the feedback.
firstly you need (it seems) to import the controls form the library inside the mx:Script tag:
CODE
<mx:Script>
<
. The part that submits the form is the "sendmycontact.send();" statement. So now the form is sent. If you dont want to provide feedback on errors or success then that is the only line you need. However i will continue! Again we declare the format of the result expected from PHP You now see we are adding EventListeners to our HTTPservice, one to listen for a positive result, and one to listen for an error known by flex as a FAULT. First you tell flex you wish to add a listener with sendmycontact.addEventListener now you tell it to listen for a result/fault event with "(ResultEvent.RESULT," (substitute result for fault of course for a fault report) and then we name that listener as "resulthandler" or "fault_handler" respectively. Any names can be used here. So now the form has been submitted and flex is eagerly listening to the PHP for any sort of output. When it receives that output it will be put into resulthandler(event) as the <mx:HTTPService> Tag defined. So now we need to create this function using the following code:CODE
function resulthandler(event):void{
if(event.result == "failed")
{
fault_handler();
}
else
{
Alert.show("Thanks! Your comments have been emailed and we will reply shortly if required.", "Thanks!");
}
}
if(event.result == "failed")
{
fault_handler();
}
else
{
Alert.show("Thanks! Your comments have been emailed and we will reply shortly if required.", "Thanks!");
}
}
So we take the value of "event" given to use by the HTTPService tag which is of course the output from PHP. (again im not sure why the :void is there but it seems to work! Feel free to correct my codes, ive only been learning flex for about 18 hours!) Now For some reason we must use the "event.result" variable/property of the event which contains the actual PHP output. In my PHP i wrote or die("failed") so in the event of some error my PHP output is simply the word failed so my IF statement logically checks to see i the output was "failed" If it was then there was of course an error and i need to notify my user and i do so using the fault_handler() function explained in a sec. The else statement of course is there in the event that the output is NOT the word failed (hence the PHP succeeded and the email was sent) then we can tell the user the email was sent using that alert box there. The first string is the message displayed and the second, shorter string, is the text of the alert box's title bar. So the user is greeted with a message saying they have done their part and can wait for the reply or whatever.
CODE
function fault_handler():void{
Alert.show("The operation failed. Your comments were not received due to a technical failure. Please try again later after we have fixed this problem", "Failed");
}
Alert.show("The operation failed. Your comments were not received due to a technical failure. Please try again later after we have fixed this problem", "Failed");
}
This is the opposite function that simply gives an alert telling the user it failed and to try again later.
And that my friends is that! Of course to trigger this lot off you need to use: click"sendmyemail()" in your submit button.
As i said ive only been learning flex since last night so this isny fool proof and its not very neat. But it gives you a nice starting point. What i would really like to find out is how to prevent my form being submitted if my validation (see SM's tut) flags up an error. Im working on that now!! But if you know an easy solution to that then reply and let me know
