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Hello everyone,

I have a tricky task ahead: on our web site we are asking people to read a non-disclosure agreement, then fill in a form with personal information, address, etc., a check box that "I agree to be bound by this NDA" , and the electronic form of a signature by providing a text field. When people submit this form, the following needs to happen:

1. A PDF needs to be created, containing the language of the NDA, the personal information of the filer, and the pdf needs to be emailed to the filer and saved in the database.

2. A user account needs to be created, with that persons details, plus this account needs to be put into a joomla user group that is associated with an ACL to access further information.

In other words, I need to hook into the whole submission process.

Apart from creating PDFs (something for a different component), what can you guys recommend? Is the chronoforms V3 book going to help me? Has any of you gone thru a similar exercise? I am relatively new to joomla and php - but have plenty of experience with MS technologies, JS, SQL, DHTML, FLEX, etc.

So yes, I did connect my form to a database table, and submissions seem to collect fine.

Trying to get a head start ...

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Hi iko,

If you use ChronoForms v4 then the Joomla! Registration action will plug into the form process flow along with all of the rest (apart from the PDF). I think that the latest release has the code to handle Custom groups.

Bob

Thx. Just went thru the pdf tutorial "CFV4 Joomla! Registration". Very good. Regarding the V3 book: how much of it still applies to version 4? Would it help me in my quest, or should I wait until more docs for V4 comes out?

Hi Iko,

The book was written for CFv3 and in CFv4 the whay the Forms Manager and Forms Wizards work has changed almost completely; the way that form action are used is similare - but much more flexible; and between CF and Joomla! there are some small but important changes to the way that code is written.

That said pretty much every recipe in the book can be adapted to work with CFv4 and Joomla! 2.5; sometimes the cahnges are very small, sometimes CFv4 is simpler, sometimes you need a re-think. My best estimate is that about 60% of the book is still valid and it's still a good source to answer 'How do I do that questions' if you are familiar with ChronoForms. If you are very new then it may confuse rather than help.

There are some CFv4 tutorials on my site and some extracts from the book at http://greyhead.net/chronoforms

Bob

Thanks for the link. Lot's of good stuff there for the beginner like me ;-) I can see how this evolves into the next book. Great work.

Two how-to-s I would have an immediate need for:

1. The pdf user registration example is great, and I used it to add more fields to the initial signup. It get's a little trickier when you want activation via email and have joomlas self-register option switched off (as recommended in the tutorial). You will need to provide your own activation url and response to any requests. Would be awesome, if you could walk us through ;-)

2. A super "action" would be to create, populate, and possibly modify articles from a form. The idea is to standardize formatting, make sure certain information is filled out, etc. Using forms you can enforce a little bit of structure in otherwise unstructured information, and create more homogeneous articles... I can also see other uses, such as articles that then become PDFs or PDF books.. At any rate this action would need to set the same parameters as regular article edits, especially, ACL, title, category, etc. and in the form you can decide what kind of information you want to populate from users or from your own logic.

WDYT?

Hi Iko,

1) I didn't write the Joomla! Registration tutorials and haven't yet needed to work with that functionality in CFv4. I do know that Max has upgraded the action since the tuturial was written and some of those changes have been around user activation.

2) Is a good idea, I've been wondering vaguely about that for a little while. I have some 'article' work to do in the next week or so and may try to write a more structured version of the current 'Submit Article' action.

Bob