Explanation of online form submission

Introduction and procedure

All Eco Companion online form submission follows this same general procedure ...

• Add your relevant values to the form elements (fields)
• Mandatory elements (denoted by ) must be completed
• Some elements have content checking rules (help documents and form prompts explain these rules)
• Submit the form by pressing the button near the bottom of the page
• Any errors in your submission will cause an error message to be displayed which outlines all of the problems with your form.
• The form, with all of your current values, will be displayed below the error messages. There is no need to use your browser's "back" button.
• More hints about the status of your completed form are given by other symbols:
  • means that the content of this element is valid
  • means that the content of this element is incorrect. An error message at the top of the page will explain the problem.
• When the content of all elements is valid, then the documents will be generated in your private area. You can view these documents and edit them again as required. When you are satisfied with the presentation then you can choose to publish the document.

Mandatory and desired elements

• Form elements marked with are mandatory and must be completed. Help documents will explain these elements and say why they are mandatory.
• Form elements marked with are desired and do not need to be completed. However, these elements would be useful because they add information that helps relevant documents to be discovered by the search system.

Include only the information that you want to make public

You should only complete the desired and optional elements if you want that information to be known by the public. For example, you may not want searchers to find your phone number, so simply do not complete that optional element.

However, bear in mind that if you add extra information, such as describing your business products (e.g. your frog species detection kit that enabled your data collection) using relevant keywords, then your documents will be more likely to be discovered by searchers.

Limited set of HTML elements allowed in certain fields

Some fields can accept either plain text (presented as a single paragraph) or a limited set of HTML elements for improved presentation.

Help document "Edit dataset description" has further explanation. You must follow a strict set of rules as to what elements can be used.

This facility then gives you some control over the presentation of those fields. For example, adding the following fragment of HTML to the "Abstract" field ...

<p>
The datafile <b>capital.csv</b> has the following format ...
</p>
<ul>
  <li>city_name</li>
  <li>longitude</li>
  <li>latitude</li>
</ul>
<p>
This crude example map
<a href="http://www.indexgeo.com.au/data/capital/capital.gif">capital.gif</a>
was generated from this datafile.
</p>

... will be presented as a paragraph, followed by a list, followed by a paragraph with a hypertext link ...

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The datafile capital.csv has the following format ...

• city_name
• longitude
• latitude

This crude example map capital.gif was generated from this datafile.

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Please note that all tags must be closed ... <li> must finish with </li> and <p> must finish with </p>.

Notes about known browser problems

We have found that the MS Internet Explorer browser (version 3 on Windows95 or Windows NT) will discard any HTML elements found in a textarea field when the browser presents the document to you in a form for editing. So, if you try to use HTML elements as described in the previous section then you will have problems. You can add the HTML elements successfully and your documents will be properly edited on our server. However, the next time that you try to edit the values, you will find that Internet Explorer has again discarded the existing values. Internet Explorer version 4 and all versions of Netscape are fine.

URL:http://www.indexgeo.com.au/ec/help/submit.html
Last Modified: 19 October 2001