Forms Manager

When visiting web sites you'll often need to fill out forms where you have to enter similar data like your name, email addresses, passwords etc. iCab provides different ways to help filling out web forms so you don't have to enter the same values over and over again. You can save the current values of web forms and fill out the form later again using these saved values. iCab can also fill out certain form field without the need to have saved the forms before. It is even possible that iCab autocompletes your input while you enter text.

All these form fill out features can be configured in the Forms Manager that can be opened using the menu item Tools > Forms Manager.

iCab saves all the form data in the Keychain application of the MacOS. So all the data is saved secure and encrypted. But you have to allow the keychain application to store and retrieve the form data. Especially when an iCab update is installed, the keychain application will ask the user if the new version of iCab is allowed to access the form data which was saved by the old version of iCab. This is normal behaviour which makes sure that no new application is able to access sensible data without the permission of the user.

In the Forms Manager there are three section, each one contains the settings for another way to fill out forms. Each section can be activated individually, so that iCab can try to automatically fill out the forms of visited web sites using this special method. If automatical form fill is disabled, you can still initiate the form fill manually using the menu item View > Fill out forms will check for each web site you visit, if there are forms which can be filled out automatically

Field-based
Here you can configure the field-based form fill feature. You can add any number of words and phrases in the list. As soon as you start entering some text in an input field in web forms, iCab will look for words and phrases in this list which start with the same letters you have just entered. If iCab found a matching item, it will automatically complete your input with the found text. So usually you only have to enter two or three letters in an input field and the rest can be filled out by iCab.

This feature is very useful for all the information you have to enter in many web forms (like email addresses, your name, address, telephone number etc.)

This feature can be used for all forms, even in forms which were never visited before.

Key-based
Here you can configure the autocomplete feature which is based on the key names of form fields. In most forms the input field where you have to enter your name is named "name" internally. So iCab could check if a form contains a field with the name "name" and automatically fills in your name here. This autocomplete feature will work on all forms, even forms you've never visited before.

The list of form data has two columns: the key and the value. The "key" column can contain a comma separated list of names which represent the (internal) names of input fields. Because the field name is not always the same on all web pages (for example a web page may use the name "city" and another the name "town" for an input field where you should enter the town in which you live), just provide a comma-separated list of names which have the similar meaning. This makes it more likely that a name can be found which is really used on the web site. The "value" column contains the text that should be filled into the form field.

Example:

KeyValue
city,townNew York
countryUSA
email,mailmy.name@mydomain.invalid
address,streetPark Avenue 123

Please note that even if the web page itself is in German or French or in another non-English language, the internal names are often nevertheless in English. So you should always add english key names in the list.

Form-based
This autocompletion feature is used to fill out login forms. In order to get this feature working, you have to visit the web page once, fill out the form manually and then save the form using the menu item View > Save Forms. The saved forms data will then be listed in the forms manager. You can edit the description, URL and user name any time again.