the Init Val to the text Enter your problem here. Checkboxes Check boxes, like the ones that appear in the Properties Inspector, allow you to enable or disable selections within forms. More importantly, check boxes allow you to select multiple options from a group of options. For instance, in our HelpDesk example, we'll ask the user to check all company-owned equipment that the user has in their possession. Because a user could potentially have a computer, a cell phone, a PDA, and so on, we'll want to allow the user to select multiple items by enabling multiple check boxes. If the user only has one item, fine. But at the very least, we want to provide them with the opportunity to select multiple items. Collecting as much information as possible from the employee will help the support technician better troubleshoot the employee's problem. To add and work with Checkbox form objects in Dreamweaver, follow these steps: 1. Place your cursor in the fourth cell of the first column and enter the text Equipment:. 2. Place your cursor in the fourth cell of the second column and click the Checkbox icon in the Insert bar to add a new Checkbox form object to the table's cell. 3. Place your cursor to the right of the check box and enter the text Computer. 4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 three more times, entering a Checkbox form object and adding the text Laptop, Cell Phone, and PDA. When you finish, the page should resemble Figure 9.7. Figure 9.7. Add three more Checkbox form objects, complete with text. [View full size image] Notice that selecting a Checkbox form object exposes a set of customizable properties in the Properties Inspector: CheckBox name: Enter the unique name of the Checkbox form object in this text box. In most cases, you'll want to enter the same name for all Checkbox form objects related to a specific group. Because we have four Checkbox objects that relate to equipment, we'll name them all equipment. This arrangement allows the application that will process this form to iterate through the Checkbox group and return a list of checked values, covered next. Checked value: The value you enter here is the value that is sent to the server for processing. For our Checkbox objects, we'll want to enter the values Computer, Laptop, Cell Phone, and PDA respectively. Initial state: You can set the state of the Checkbox form object to either checked or unchecked when the form loads for the first time. Because we'll assume that everyone has a computer, select that Checkbox form object in the Document window and change the Initial State value in the Properties Inspector to Checked. Set all others to Unchecked. Class: When working with CSS, select a class from this menu to set the overall style of the Checkbox object. We'll leave ours blank. Radio Buttons and Radio Groups Similar to Checkbox form objects, Radio Button form objects allow users to select options within a form. The difference between Radio Buttons and Checkboxes, however, is that with Radio Buttons, users can select only one option from a list of options. In our example, we'll want to filter potential problems by type: hardware or software. Since the user's problem can't technically be both hardware and software related, we'll want to limit the choice to one or the other. This can easily be accomplished by adding two Radio Buttons, one for each type of equipment problem. To add and work with Radio Button form objects in Dreamweaver, follow these steps: