General comments

One of the options grouped together under Dreamweaver's form objects are lists and menus. They function in a similar manner, other than if you pick lists as the type, you can determine how many items in the list displays on the screen. If you pick menu then only one option is viewable at a given time. Furthermore the list selection permits you to allows users to select multiple options from the listing, although I doubt most users would recognize this as an option or know how to do this.

As you create either lists or menus in your form, in the normal Dreamweaver document window, you will not SEE the labels appearing inside the box. You have to press the F12 key to view the page in your browser to see what it will look like.

Lists

If you pick the option of list, then you can enter a number for height. This tells the browser how many items in the drop-down listing show at a given time. If you pick 3 and there are 4 items in the list, then the browser automatically creates the scroll arrow to the side.

Just as for other types of fields in a form, you need to give a field name.

Entering options for the list

One of items in the Property inspector window is a button for List Values..

Clicking on this button brings up a special screen in which you type in the label and the value. The label column is the text that will appear on the screen, when the form is posted to your server. This text needs to be clear for the user. You can press the TAB key to move from one column to the next, similar to working your way through a table in a word processor.

The value column may not seem necessary, but this column contains the values that will be associated with the label. For example, the label may show a complete department name, but since only you as the form creator will see the results, you could have a departmental acroymn or abbreviation returned to you. The label text and the value text can be the same, but I wanted to stress that they do not have to be the same exact text.

After you enter labels and values for each label, and close the input screen, you will see a partial listing showing. To edit or change the listing, click on the List Values button again.

Notice that the drop-down list or menu does not allow you to enter a character width. The width of the field is determined by the length of the labels you enter.

Menus

The options for menu are the same, other than you are not allowed to enter a height for how many rows display. If you pick menu, only one row displays at a time.

This document is part of a set of tutorials related to putting a form on your website. The initial page is found at cals.arizona.edu/ecat/forms/olderforms.html