Making some changes and have a few questions

[Charlene]

Hello there Form Tools gurus!

I've been using FT for a while now (two years or so) as a membership management system for a group of listservs. As a time saver I built everything to interact with Form Builder, so it is all internal (on v 2.2.6).

However we are now upgrading our process and trying to build in some tools that help us to audit our members and retain better control over the data. Due to this, I have a few questions:

- I know that conditional forms are not possible, but just double checking that there are no options here (the last thread I saw on this was last updated in 2013). We would ideally like to have something like ... Q: Are you a member of our network > selecting yes would then lead to a drop down of organizations in our network.

- Is validation against the data collected possible with Form Builder? We get a TON of duplicates and would thus like to check the email address against the existing submissions. I've looked at the uniqueness tutorial, but can't find the correct file to edit (feeling massively stupid).

- If validation is possible, would I be able to build something that validated initially and then went to separate forms dependent on the outcome?

- Last but not least, when grouping List Options, will it show a header? For instance I want to list our member organizations by country and need to find a way to group them (we have 1100 orgs so one big list would be too painful for users).

Any thoughts on any of the above are welcome! Willing to get creative if need be =)

Mucho thanks in advance!

-Charlene

[alexh]

Hey there! I took a stab at answering some of your questions. Hopefully this will help a bit.

Hello there Form Tools gurus!

I've been using FT for a while now (two years or so) as a membership management system for a group of listservs. As a time saver I built everything to interact with Form Builder, so it is all internal (on v 2.2.6).

However we are now upgrading our process and trying to build in some tools that help us to audit our members and retain better control over the data. Due to this, I have a few questions:

- I know that conditional forms are not possible, but just double checking that there are no options here (the last thread I saw on this was last updated in 2013). We would ideally like to have something like ... Q: Are you a member of our network > selecting yes would then lead to a drop down of organizations in our network.

With the form builder module, or internal forms, this is not possible. You can, however, create a custom form and build this. It will have to be an external form, and programmed outside of Form Builder.

- Is validation against the data collected possible with Form Builder? We get a TON of duplicates and would thus like to check the email address against the existing submissions. I've looked at the uniqueness tutorial, but can't find the correct file to edit (feeling massively stupid).

To be honest, I'm not very familiar with the FormBuilder module, as all of the forms I have built have been custom external forms, or internal forms. I would take a look at this documentation:

http://docs.formtools.org/tutorials/chec...page=index

"A common problem is that you need to check an incoming form submission to ensure the data being added to the database hasn't already been added. For example, maybe you have a registration form and you want to prevent duplicate entries from the same email address. Or maybe you want to check to see if someone with the same name hasn't already submitted the form. Users are notoriously good at finding innovative ways to mess up your data, so we need to stay on our toes!"

- If validation is possible, would I be able to build something that validated initially and then went to separate forms dependent on the outcome?

That's a tough one.. I don't think that's possible out of the box. I would have to think about a unique way to do that. Interesting idea though.

- Last but not least, when grouping List Options, will it show a header? For instance I want to list our member organizations by country and need to find a way to group them (we have 1100 orgs so one big list would be too painful for users).

Hmm, I guess I'm not super clear about what you mean. Are you talking about with Form Builder or?


Any thoughts on any of the above are welcome! Willing to get creative if need be =)

Mucho thanks in advance!

-Charlene

[Charlene]

Thanks so much for this!! Just as a note, totally open to moving out of form builder to tackle some of these tweaks, should that be necessary.

To clarify on the last question, I would like to have the options group on the dropdown list. For example:

Germany
Member org 1
Member org 2
Member org 3
India
Member org 1

etc ...

I do also have one additional question ...

- Is there a way to have FT send an email when a record is edited AND tell me ONLY what the changes were? I do get edit emails now, but it gives me all the data, which isn't helpful. Struggling to sort out if there are any filters/modules I could add to do this.

Again, many thanks and much appreciated!

-Charlene

Hey there! I took a stab at answering some of your questions. Hopefully this will help a bit.

Hello there Form Tools gurus!

I've been using FT for a while now (two years or so) as a membership management system for a group of listservs. As a time saver I built everything to interact with Form Builder, so it is all internal (on v 2.2.6).

However we are now upgrading our process and trying to build in some tools that help us to audit our members and retain better control over the data. Due to this, I have a few questions:

- I know that conditional forms are not possible, but just double checking that there are no options here (the last thread I saw on this was last updated in 2013). We would ideally like to have something like ... Q: Are you a member of our network > selecting yes would then lead to a drop down of organizations in our network.

With the form builder module, or internal forms, this is not possible. You can, however, create a custom form and build this. It will have to be an external form, and programmed outside of Form Builder.

- Is validation against the data collected possible with Form Builder? We get a TON of duplicates and would thus like to check the email address against the existing submissions. I've looked at the uniqueness tutorial, but can't find the correct file to edit (feeling massively stupid).

To be honest, I'm not very familiar with the FormBuilder module, as all of the forms I have built have been custom external forms, or internal forms. I would take a look at this documentation:

http://docs.formtools.org/tutorials/chec...page=index

"A common problem is that you need to check an incoming form submission to ensure the data being added to the database hasn't already been added. For example, maybe you have a registration form and you want to prevent duplicate entries from the same email address. Or maybe you want to check to see if someone with the same name hasn't already submitted the form. Users are notoriously good at finding innovative ways to mess up your data, so we need to stay on our toes!"

- If validation is possible, would I be able to build something that validated initially and then went to separate forms dependent on the outcome?

That's a tough one.. I don't think that's possible out of the box. I would have to think about a unique way to do that. Interesting idea though.

- Last but not least, when grouping List Options, will it show a header? For instance I want to list our member organizations by country and need to find a way to group them (we have 1100 orgs so one big list would be too painful for users).

Hmm, I guess I'm not super clear about what you mean. Are you talking about with Form Builder or?


Any thoughts on any of the above are welcome! Willing to get creative if need be =)

Mucho thanks in advance!

-Charlene

[alexh]

Glad I could help a little bit. As for the drop down with headers, I'm guessing it's probably not possible with form builder, but I'm not super familiar with it. There are a few ways to do it with html, check this out:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_optgroup.asp

As for the email issue, no I don't think it can just send fields that were updated.

Alex