Field Options confusion

[antonitus]

Hi Ben,

I've been playing around by adding field options for radio buttons and checkboxes. After manually trying to add them, I failed and I really couldn't get it to work properly so the best and quickest way was to delete the form and start the 'add form' process again. Maybe it was something I was doing wrong of course.

Anyway I managed to get this feature working when going through the 'add form' process, in fact it was quite easy this way.

Now I got everything fairly working except the checkboxes. For some strange reason it was not accepting multiple selection,s it only selected one of the 4 options that I have. After many hours of trying to figure it out and reading most of your documentation, I could not find an answer and then I thought of other PHP forms and how they would normally handle multiple selections. In the field name I had to add brackets at the end, e.g. fieldname[]. Maybe I'm blind but I don't think I saw it in your documentation, I could well be wrong of course. If it's not in the documentation, maybe this is something that needs to be added for other people to see.

Overall it's coming together nicely and I'm starting to learn more and more and each time I love this script.

Regards,
Tony

[Ben]

Sorry you had such a rum time of it!

This is actually just the way PHP works, it's not a Form Tools-ism. PHP requires that multi-select form elements have the [] chars in order to send all the selected items along - it's needed for both checkbox groups and multi-select dropdowns.

But you're quite right: I should document it better. The question is where... any suggestions? Maybe included in an "Add Form" tutorial? Perhaps a "Common pitfalls" section or something...? Structuring the documentation to make it as user friendly as possible is an art unto itself.

[antonitus]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your advice.

My problem is I'm not a PHP guru, I know just basic PHP so I just remembered the bracket issue. This is not stated in the documentation. I think the best place would be to put it somewhere in the 'Field Options' section. Or maybe have a separate section on how to write proper form tags for FT. Maybe I can write a small section on it for you, that might help you.

Regards,
Tony

[antonitus]

Hi Ben,

Sorry to open this thread again.

I set up 2 different forms that are controlled on 2 different websites. Everything works well except I'm having an issue with the 'Field Option's section. At the moment I believe it's a global setting as it does not allow you set field options for different forms that have been set up already. Once again, I'm probably doing something wrong or not really understanding it.

Also the other issue I have is that it won't allow you to delete a field option as it states that it is connected to another group, but I can't seem to delete that group too, so I'm finding this a little confusing. If it's not connected to another group, then it can deleted, but I couldn't see how I did it in the first place. I did read the documentation and I did initially set it up without any problem with just 1 form. Overall it's a brilliant feature that is highly needed, but it may need a little tweaking to relate the field set up per form set up.

Thanks,
Tony

[Ben]

Hey Tony,

Form Tools tries to be "smart" and only store identical field option groups once. So if you have, say, 10 forms, each of which contains one more radio button groups with the values "yes" and "no", it will only store that combination ("yes"/"no") once - the very first time it was found. When you add a form, before creating the new field option group it checks all existing ones to find a duplicate. If it isn't found it adds it, otherwise it just assigns that new field to the existing field option group ID.

So when deleting a field option group it won't let you delete it without updating all fields that have been assigned to it first, to make them assigned to ANOTHER field option group (or change them to a textbox or something). The second "Form Fields (X)" tab on the Edit Field Option Group page lists
all the fields associated with the tab.

Regarding your first problem, is it concerning step 4 of the Add Form process, or the edit field options page? The DHTML code for figuring out the field types works differently depending on where the site is located. If it's on the same website it's no problem - it just parses the fields with JS. But if it's located on another website, there's some backend trickery to download the webpage content locally to allow the JS to parse the document. In most cases you don't have to know about it since it's done behind the scenes, but in some cases the server doesn't have the functionality to scrape the webpage - in that case it should prompt you to manually upload the files.

Any help...?

- Ben

[antonitus]

Hey Ben,

Thanks for the information, I think it kind of makes sense now and I did wonder about this. So just to confirm it doesn't really matter which form it's assigned to then. The 2 forms that I have are 98% identical so overall it works out well.

Thanks,
Tony

P.S. Thanks for the help yesterday, much appreciated.

[Ben]

No problem - good to see it working properly!

[xulusports]

No problem - good to see it working properly!

Ben,

Let me first say that this script is amazing! I've been playing around with it now for a couple of days, and the more I learn, the more I appreciate the product.

I do have to say that this options topic is not as clear to me as I would like it to be. I suppose I am not really sure how the process works, and I'm hoping you can clarify a bit. I've read the excellent documentation, and here is one of the sentences: "After you fill in all the fields here, Form Tools will automatically combine identical fields behind the scenes. You don't need to worry about the details. " What exactly is happening behind the scenes? Let me give you my scenario to explain my confusion a bit:

I uploaded a form and can submit it no problem. I soon realized that I left out a "gender" selection and needed to add it. So, I added it in the "- Field Options Groups" menu with the following fields: "" - Please select..., "Male" - Male, and "Female" - Female. I then added the field to the form's database fields, added the field to my form file (index.php), and I am now able to submit the form and capture gender.

Bottom line, I guess I don't understand the purpose of adding an Option Group if I need to add it to my actual form page anyway. Assuming I create and initialize two more forms, each containing the gender selection, what will the Option Group do for me?

Thanks for the help,
Adam

[Ben]

Yeah, I see the confusion.

The idea is that it will - or CAN - reduce the amount of work for you. In your case with the gender field, it won't help much - gender options are not going to change; the group will always have two elements: male and female. Where it's useful is with other information.

Here's a rather stark example from my own experience. I did a pretty big form for Boston Pizza a couple of months ago that contained a "Location" dropdown that lists several hundred locations around the US and Canada. The form contained 17 of these dropdowns because a registrant could technically be associated with that number of locations.

Problem was, the list I'd received was in limbo and over the course of development I needed to update it half a dozen times. With the old system, this meant I had to manually update 17 separate fields - which took half an hour each time. With Field Option Groups, I just needed to do it once.

Hope this clears things up a bit!