In this post, I'm going to take a bit more of a 'code-centric" no-nonsense approach to what your form should really look like, I hope that this helps you. To help make this post as helpful as I can, I'm going to start out with some key CSS Classes then I'll move into the actual form pattern.

CSS Classes

The following is a listing of the new CSS classes that I've been using and found to be key to working with the new form pattern.

Now the above listing is just a subset of the CSS Classes that were added, but these are the basic ones that I needed to get my forms updated to the new standard.

Coding the Form

So, it is all fine and dandy that I have these items defined, but what does it actually take to get the form coded? Actually it is very simple, and I'll break it down into a number of steps for you.

Form Overview

To ensure that we start out on the right foot, lets take a high level look at what a form should look like:

<div class="dnnForm dnnClear">

    <ul class="dnnActions dnnClear">
        <li><asp:LinkButton id="btnSubmit" runat="server"
                  CssClass="dnnPrimaryAction" text="Submit" />
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

As you can see here it is pretty simple, a div to contain the entire form, then at the bottom an actions list to handle your operations.

Form Items

Once we have the overview of the form created, we can add our items. In the most basic structure items should look like the following.

<div class="dnnFormItem">
    <label>My Label</label>
    <asp:TextBox id="txtMyTextbox" runat="server" CssClass="dnnFormRequired" />
    <asp:RequiredFieldValidator id="myValidator" runat="server"
        ControlToValidate="txtMyTextbox" Text="My Error"
        CssClass="dnnFormMessage dnnFormError" display="Dynamic" />
</div>

Now, notice here that we have an individual div for each item, within this we have a HTML label and then our control(s). If you are used to using the DotNetNuke Label control for providing localized labels and help information you can substitute that control for the label as used in the above example.

To continue building out your form, simply add additional Form Item Div's as needed within the dnnForm div created above and your will be set to go.

I hope that this basic overview of the general form structure has been helpful. In future posts I will show how to create expanding/collapsing sections using the jQuery helpers

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