Creating a Form

Developing Your First Portlet
Step 6 of 8

The form for creating guestbook entries is pretty simple. All you need are two fields: one for the name of the person submitting the entry, and one for the entry itself.

Add the following tags to the end of your edit_entry.jsp file:

<aui:form action="<%= addEntryURL %>" name="<portlet:namespace />fm">
        <aui:fieldset>
            <aui:input name="name"></aui:input>
            <aui:input name="message"></aui:input>
        </aui:fieldset>

        <aui:button-row>
            <aui:button type="submit"></aui:button>
            <aui:button type="cancel" onClick="<%= viewURL.toString() %>"></aui:button>
        </aui:button-row>
</aui:form>

Save edit_entry.jsp and redeploy your application. If you refresh the page and click the Add Entry button, your form appears. If you click the Cancel button, it works! However, don’t try the Save button yet. You haven’t yet created the action that saves a guestbook entry, so clicking Save produces an error.

Figure 1: This is the Guestbook application's form for adding entries.

Implementing the portlet action (what happens when the user clicks Save) is your next task.