Problems with registration in CSS Form Builder

I've built a simple three line registration form. First name, last name and email. I tweak the design and set up the mail send function. Test in DW CS5 and everything looks good. Upload to the server and the form shows the invalid msg. for each entry immediately after loading the page. I can't get rid of it!! I've wasted HOURS trying to get this fixed. Runs fine on my local machine in live view. Looks really stupid on the remote server.

Really tired of nothing being straight forward with anything in this suite of tools. I think I've read other places here..."I don't feel like I'm saving any time when I have to spend hours testing stuff that doesn't work the way you'd expect it to" and just doesn't.

Any help would be appreciated!

It sounds like to me that all your assets are not uploaded to the server... namely the "Spry" folder. Make sure you have reloaded your Spry folder as that is probably why you're seeing the invalid messages.

Can't be true as long as the spry folder lives in the webassist folder. In each re-do of the form I deleted both the form and the webassist folder from the remote server and then uploaded the both from the locally stored copy. The webassist folder holds all the changes. The entire folder was uploaded "new" each time.

I had to go into the CSS form and delete the validation off the page to get it to work. I was using the "sharp" template that came with the suite of tools. It's definitely not working. The text is embedded to the right of each form cell and it's not supposed to show unless someone doesn't fill in a blank that's required. That's not what it's doing. It's showing the error messages on the form load immediately.

But the spry folder does NOT live within the WebAssist folder. Spry Assets are native to Dreamweaver and are usually installed on the root level by Dreamweaver unless it was explicitly designated in the advanced properties to place it somewhere else. You should see a folder on your root level titled "SpryAssets". I have had the same issue in the past until I remembered to send that folder up to the server.

Even though I got it to do what I needed it to do, it's not working the way it's supposed to!!

Right now there is no validation error showing even when there should be because I deleted the error text to get it to show properly on form load.

So, what I'm saying is this really isn't "solved" just because I found a way to work around the problem. I think there's something wrong with the "short" registration templates. The other short registration I tried before this one did the same thing.

Again, when you see the validation errors when the page loads, that is because the "SpryAssets" are not present. The SpryAssets are used to hide and show validation errors based on conditions. When the spry files are not there, it won't hide them as desired.

I can attest that Form Builder works exactly as it is supposed to. In fact, I used it today to put several forms up and cannot replicate the issue you are referring to.

Best regards,

Brian

Thanks for the insight! Didn't know that. Would be nice if these things were obvious. Not sure if this is something I "should" know or it's all a learning experience, but I can definitely say that I can waste hours trying to get this stuff to work the way you would think would be obvious.

Either way, thanks for that info. I'll check into it further.

Kim,

I can relate to your frustration. However, in this case I think the fault probably lies with Dreamweaver. Sometimes it doesn't identify files that it should upload in order to make a page work properly, which may be the reason why your SpryAssets folder wasn't uploaded originally - believe me this type of problem has caught me out on more than one occasion over the years.

My advice to you is to always manually FTP any files you think need to be included in order to get your pages to function properly. Hopefully Adobe will fix this long-standing issue in their next release of Dreamweaver...