Forums

I am having a problem with ChronoForms that only occurs once and awhile. I have two different sites on two different hosts and the problems may or may not be related.

Site One (http://www.riversidesnowbirds.com/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=submit_dir): I have a Multi Page form with 8 steps. 'Enable Steps Navigation' is turned on and the parent and each of the 8 steps have 'Republish Fields if Error Occurs' set to 'yes'. The form sends an e-mail and does not save data in the database. The form works without a problem most of the time. Every once and awhile, however, it loses information. On one of the pages (not always the same page) if you click on 'Continue' (the submit button), nothing happens. If you click the button again, you go to the next page but any information that was entered on the page before the page with the button problem is lost (including required information.) If you step back the fields are blank. If you submit the form, the e-mail received contains the field name in brackets for the missing information instead of data or spaces (whether or not information was entered in to the field.) When I receive the e-mail, I can tell this happened because of the bracketed field names.

Site Two (http://www.lansingpowersquadron.org/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=registration): I have a one page form that again works most of the time. Every once and awhile I receive an e-mail without required information (the e-mail fields are blank.) I am unable to get past the required fields without entering information when I use the form.

I don't know if these problems are related since they are on different websites on different web hosts but if the required information is missing, sometimes I don't even know who submitted the form. On the multi page form, I added a server side edit to check if the 'last name' field (required) is empty to let the user know that there was an error and they should page back to review their data. I also added a page that displays the information they entered after they submit the form so they can see if anything is missing.

Since the problem doesn't occur most of the time, I'm wondering if it could be browser or computer related (although I have experienced the multi page problem myself even though most of the time it works fine for me.

Any ideas?

Jim

Hi Jim,

Sorry for the delay; I just re-found this post.

It's really hard to diagnose occasional errors like this. My best guess is that the first one may be linked to the session time. The default Joomla! setting is 15 minutes and if users get distracted between steps the session may time out and data will be lost.

The second one may be from spambots that don't have JavaScript running and therefore get to bypass the validation checks. If it's a big problem then a little server-side validation may block it.

Bob

Thanks for your ideas but I don't think either is the cause of my problems. In the first case, it has happened to me when I was testing and spending no more than a minute on each page. I would double click the "continue" button and nothing would happen. When I clicked it again, it took me to the next page and I am able to submit the form but it is missing the information on the page before the problem. I added a server side edit to see if the required name field is missing, but a form was still sent to me without a name, probably because when I receive it, instead of having nothing in the field like it would be if information wasn't added, it contains the field name in brackets (the same way the e-mail would arrive if I typed a field name wrong in the e-mail template.) About one submission in twenty seems to have a problem and if the same person submits a new form they usually don't have the problem.

In the second case, both of the e-mails I received without required information were from someone I know (I could determine this from their e-mail address.)

Thanks again and if you have any other ideas let me know.

Jim