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Dear forum posters...

I am building a website for an organisation that I am a co-founder of, which supports a danish youth string orchestra in danger of being shut down.
I am using Joomla! 1.6 and Chronoforms v.4 to enable potential members of the organisation to sign up via the page I'm creating, and so far things are working fine. However - I have a couple of questions that could improve the functionality of the registration.

First of all, I have only a couple of weeks of experience with web design and coding in general, so if you have the patience, please write in a language understandable by a coding novice.

So far - by filling out the registration form on my webpage, an online record is created, which is viewable via the site administrator and my Chronoforms component, AND an email containing the data in simple text is forwarded to my mailbox.

Is there any way of automatically adding the data to an OpenOffice Calc or Base file? Or in some way making the text compatible with pasting it directly into a Base database?

You can visit the site here: http://druensvenner.cloudaccess.net
- a lot of content is still missing, but the form is accessible through "Foreningen->Bliv Medlem->Blanket" (http://druensvenner.cloudaccess.net/forening/bliv-medlem/blanket.html)

In my search of information I've discovered that the v.3 of Chronoforms had an "Export to Excel" function when viewing table data - am I missing this in my installation? Or has that function not made it to v.4?

Thankyou in advance for taking time to read this - I hope someone can point my in the right direction.

Regards
- Anders, Denmark

Hi Anders.

It sounds as though you are making good progress.

You should add a DB save action to save the form results to the site MySQL database. There is not easy way of saving directly to an external Open Office database. It might be technically possible but I wouldn't recommend it.

I have a CSV Export action here that you can use to export a CSV file from the MySQL database that it should be possible to import into an external database.

Bob

I believe I'm already storing the data to the MySQLdatabase - when accessing myphpadmin via cloud control panel, I can see several of the tables I created via the forms manager. Is this what you mean?

I downloaded the action you suggested - I am not sure how to install it:

To install the action download and unzip the attachment and then copy the contents to the administrator/components/com_chronoforms/form_actions folder on your site.

Where do I upload the action?

I've been working a bit more on the SQL-databases via myphpadmin in cloudcontrolpanel, and found a manual way of exporting the data to csv-files that I can edit in MS Excel - so that's great! Part of the issue solved🙂
However, a new problem has arisen...
Lately, when I fill out a form and submit it, I get a server error:

The website encountered an error while retrieving http://druensvenner.cloudaccess.net/forening/bliv-medlem/blanket.html?event=submit. It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly.

As far as I can tell I have configured my form correctly, connecting it to a database created with Forms Manager enabling all fields and using the default field types (varchar, datetime etc...)

Can something I have done in myphpadmin caused this error?
The only change I made was 'dropping' some of my old test-tables - that shouldn't be an issue?

Regards - Anders

Double check to make sure your current forms are not still trying to save data to your old 'test-tables'.

I have seen some cases where people forgot to apply changes to their forms after they changed them and it went back to using tables that they had already deleted (which caused issues).

I don't know the 100% answer, but you may want to double check it just in case!

@hannylicious
I checked that several times with no results...
I'm going to create a new form from scratch and see if the same thing happens. I don't want to spend hours tracking down some crazy bug when starting over could be faster. I'll report back and see if I find a solution to the issue.
Thank you for the suggestion!