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Hi Guys,

I have a complex form requirement, and am not a coder - so before I start hitting my head against the proverbial brick wall I thought I would ask some questions here!

The Scenario:

I am building (well trying to!) a guild website, please be gentle i am using joola and performing graphic editing for the first time!(link. Due to this, and need to design and implement a specific applications process, integrated into Joomla 1.5 and phpBB3. The process is based on ideas to try to solve a number of application 'problems' we have had in the past ;-)

1) A user would click a link with a property and that would need to open the relevent form:

example: There would be multiple apply now links, by class, one for barbarians, another for mages, etc . The application form would have questions\sections that are shared between both classes, and questions that are class specific.

(elaboration: there are 14 classes, some questions would be in all applications, classes are split into 4 archetypes, so some would be archetype specific, and some would be class specific, so questiosn would come from three 'pools' - I guess I could create 14 differing forms, but that does not seem ideal when it comes to changes!)

2) The form that loads has certain details already filled in, as this information is available in the user profile in phpbb3 (am planning on bridging joomla and phpbb3 via RokBridge).

example: d.o.b is an required field in the profile, so i would like actual age to be part of the submitted data. As I want them to be logged in to submit a form, I would want the forum username to be submitted etc - I assume this woudl require polling the existing database ?

Once the form is filled in (and validated!) I need several things to happen:

3)An email to be sent back to the submitter, confirming the data they have provided, preferably in a formated fashion.

4)A unique ID to be attached to that email
(A submission id, it would need to be in the database as well)

5)The data would need to be submitted to a mySQL database

6)A formatted version of the form to be submitted to a phpBB3 forum, preferably as the user concerned.
(include submission id, date, other details etc)

7) An email to be sent to certain users (phpbb3 group?), Saying "user X, has submitted a form, He is class Y follow this link, to view it."

Ideally I would like to do more with it, but I am sure that if I can get this done the other areas can follow....

So as a non programmer (but somone who is logical and can follow indtructions - I can modify code (or have in the past), is this possible with chronoform ?!?

Many thanks in advance for anyones time in running through an answer, and for any 'how to' tips recieved ;-)

PS: I have no issues in needing the licensed version, or even contributing a small donation, but as I don't plan on any commercial activities on this site I doubt I could just pay to have it developed!<br><br>Post edited by: Mizpah, at: 2007/11/18 01:00

Hi mizpah,

Welcome🙂

As I've said before, all of this is possible, though not necessarily trivial and will require a fair chunk of coding.

1) The link needs to pass to ChronoForms one or more variables that identify the class and archetype. This can be done through GET variables in the link e.g. {form_link}?class=this_call&archetype=that_archetype or through hidden fields in a 'dummy form' that just has a submit button.

2) You'll need the PHP and MYSQL to identify the user (typically because they are logged in and you look up their user data) AND to identify them in the other database tables (i.e. their PHPBB id). Once you have the ids you can read the data from the database tables, populate your form and display it.

You can easily use PHP if (){} or switch () statements to put different questions in the form depending on the user info.

3) You can use the 'Special Fields' to do this and an email template to format it.

4) You can generate a special ID of your own or use the record identifier from the database, you'd need to PHP to create or to read this.

5) ChronoForms allows you to save form data to a database very simply - but the code to access it is very basic. If you want to do anything with it - show it in forms, etc. then you'd need to write the code (not very difficult).

6 & 7) ChronoForms supports one email 'out of the box' (to several addresses) however it's fairly simple to add more emails with a little coding in the OnSubmit fields in ChronoForms - you can find examples in the forums here.

We can't code this for you but it's an interesting project. I'd suggest that you take it step by step and ask here for help when you need it.

I hope that helps a bit.

Bob