[Pro] Feedback form issues

Freeway
1

Hi, I am having issues with the feedback form on the above page. The email received after sending the form, only contains a few of the actual fields, and all in the incorrect order. None of the drop-down items inputs display in the email at all.

Any feedback would be really helpful. Many thanks.

https://www.medicalforumtheatre.co.za/patient-satisfaction-survey.html

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2

Okay, you are using the Send Form Action bundled with Freeway. This gets your issue down to one path to debug. The order of form elements is driven EXCLUSIVELY by the order of those fields in HTML source order. Nothing else you do in the layout or the tab order can influence that.

To visualize and change the sort order of elements, use the little “disclosure triangle” widget left of the page name in the left pane of the Freeway interface. You will see a list of all named elements on the page, which includes the form elements. In an absolute-positioned layout, where you have drawn all the elements on the page, you can change their source order by moving them up and down in the list of element names. Freeway changes their stacking order without changing their x/y coordinates, and that allows you to have fields in a different visual order than they appear in the source code.

You are using a table to hold your form elements in alignment with the field labels, which is good. This gives you a great deal of control over how the fields are ordered, because the table is one element in terms of the stacking order, and the fields’ source order is deterministic within that one positioned element. Tables are read out (in a left-to-right-configured browser) in the order of rows top to bottom, and within those rows, left to right in the row. If you have a single row with City, State, Zip all compacted together, those would appear in the order that you present them. If you have first name on one row, and last name on the next row, they would again be presented in that order.

It would be interesting to hear what order you are getting, and what you expect, exactly. What I can see from here is mostly correct.

Notes:

  1. You are using a textarea for the name and surname fields. This should be a text box instead. A textarea may accept line-break characters, and returns multiple lines of text. A text box only accepts one line of text, no line-breaks.

  2. You are using hyphens in the field name for Age Category. Change that to age_category. Never use a hyphen in the name, because PHP cannot parse it. (It treats it as if you were asking it to do arithmetic on the two halves of the name)

  3. (Not programming related) Gender is not a binary, and it may never be required as a value. Always include Other and Choose not to disclose. That’s just humane.

  4. Under Nursing staff, you have an input for courteous and respectful that does not have a name attribute. It has the ID item10. Inputs without names will never be sent to the server by the browser. The name must be page-unique, and it must be a legal value (begins with the letter a-z, either case, and only includes the underscore or 0-9 as a non-a-z character). Names you enter in Freeway that include spaces will be silently converted to be separated by dashes. This is not going to work in a PHP environment, like the Send Form handler.

  5. “Information prior to procedure” has the same error as #4

  6. Ibid for all the other selects that follow. Click on each select, and look in the third tab from the left in the Inspector. The picker at the top of that pane is probably set to None. You may switch it to Use Name/ID, or simply enter a value as desired.

I can’t spend more time looking at this now, but if you have more questions, please post back.

Walter

On Sep 7, 2018, at 7:26 AM, Matt Covarr email@hidden wrote:

Hi, I am having issues with the feedback form on the above page. The email received after sending the form, only contains a few of the actual fields, and all in the incorrect order. None of the drop-down items inputs display in the email at all.

Any feedback would be really helpful. Many thanks.

Medical Forum Theatre Day Hospital - Patient satisfaction survey

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3

Hi Walter,

Thanks for your feedback, certainly helpful and much appreciated! I have worked through the various points you’ve made and all is working now as it should.

The only things which I cannot seem to get to the bottom of is the order of the information which comes though within the email received from the form.

In Freeway, on the page toggle, I see the forms content/elements as you have suggested, but these are a mixture of actions and text fields. None of this appears in the order of which it’s set up in on the form. It reflects the order of which they appear in the email. I have used the Form Element Styler action on the various drop down items. These are just Freeway menu items, dropped into the form alongside their text.

I cannot reorder these via the page toggle at all, they don’t allow me to do that.

Would you possibly have any ideas?

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4

It’s possible to change the form order visually or just in source code to alter the order in which the values are sent to the form handler, but the way that the form handler is constructed (by the Action) it’s not possible to leave the form alone and change the order of the fields in the e-mail.

You have constructed the form using the most bullet-proof layout technique possible – a table. This will (as you have seen) resist any changes behind the scenes, because there is no layer order to manipulate inside a table. The data is simply there in rows and columns, and reads out in the order of the fields.

As a debugging step, I took a copy of your form, pasted it into a text editor, re-assigned the form target to point to my Reflector script, and read out the raw data being sent to the server by your form. Here’s what that looks like:

Array
(
    [Name] => First name
    [Surname] => Last name
    [Procedure] => Ear, nose & throat
    [Age_category] => 46-60 Years
    [Gender] => Choose not to disclose
    [Nursing_staff_courtesy] => Good
    [Pre_procedure_information] => Good
    [Admissions_process] => Good
    [Patient_privacy] => Good
    [Nursing_staff_responsiveness] => Good
    [Admin_staff_responsiveness] => Good
    [Waiting_time_in_waiting_area] => Good
    [Waiting_time_in_ward] => Good
    [Level_of_cleanliness_wards] => Good
    [Level_of_cleanliness_waiting_area] => Good
    [Noise_level_and_comfort] => Good
    [Pain_controlled] => Good
    [Medication_explained] => Good
    [Recommendation] => Maybe
    [comments] => Anything
    [submit-patient-survey_x] => 173
    [submit-patient-survey_y] => 35
    [sendForm22846] => 
)

Is that similar to, or wildly different from, the e-mail that you get? Can you paste here an example form submission, so we can compare?

I also noted two things about the form at the source level that you could correct:

  1. There’s a stray “gender” picker at the bottom of the page, named Gender1. Looks like an errant copy/paste operation.
  2. The Name and Surname fields are still coded as textarea, rather than input. Textarea is for letting people type as many words as they want to, with paragraphs and everything.

Walter

On Sep 10, 2018, at 4:37 AM, Matt Covarr email@hidden wrote:

Hi Walter,

Thanks for your feedback, certainly helpful and much appreciated! I have worked through the various points you’ve made and all is working now as it should.

The only things which I cannot seem to get to the bottom of is the order of the information which comes though within the email received from the form.

In Freeway, on the page toggle, I see the forms content/elements as you have suggested, but these are a mixture of actions and text fields. None of this appears in the order of which it’s set up in on the form. It reflects the order of which they appear in the email. I have used the Form Element Styler action on the various drop down items. These are just Freeway menu items, dropped into the form alongside their text.

I cannot reorder these via the page toggle at all, they don’t allow me to do that.

Would you possibly have any ideas?

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5

Hi Walter,

Thanks once again, helpful indeed. This is what I get in the email below. See the name, surname and comments are all grouped together in an odd position towards the bottom.

Procedure: Ear, nose & throat
Age_category: 31-45 Years
Gender: Male
Nursing_staff_courtesy: Good
Pre_procedure_information: Excellent
Admissions_process: Good
Patient_privacy: Excellent
Nursing_staff_responsiveness: Poor
Admin_staff_responsiveness: Good
Waiting_time_in_waiting_area: Excellent
Waiting_time_in_ward: Good
Level_of_cleanliness_wards: Good
comments: Test
Name: Matthew
Surname: Covarr
Level_of_cleanliness_waiting_area: Excellent
Noise_level_and_comfort: Excellent
Pain_controlled: Poor
Medication_explained: Excellent
Recommendation: Maybe

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6

Wow. That is just plain weird. I cannot explain that at all. Could you please post the content of the file ‘FW_SendForm_patient-satisfaction-survey_twoLeft2.php’ from your Site Folder? It will not contain anything that could compromise your server, it’s just auto-generated code.

It’s a lot of code to paste here, so if you would, go to https://gist.github.com, paste it there, and then when you submit that form, you’ll be redirected to a new page showing the code. Copy that page’s URL and paste it here on one line by itself. The FreewayTalk interface will understand that and format it properly for view inline.

Walter

On Sep 10, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Matt Covarr email@hidden wrote:

Hi Walter,

Thanks once again, helpful indeed. This is what I get in the email below. See the name, surname and comments are all grouped together in an odd position towards the bottom.

Procedure: Ear, nose & throat
Age_category: 31-45 Years
Gender: Male
Nursing_staff_courtesy: Good
Pre_procedure_information: Excellent
Admissions_process: Good
Patient_privacy: Excellent
Nursing_staff_responsiveness: Poor
Admin_staff_responsiveness: Good
Waiting_time_in_waiting_area: Excellent
Waiting_time_in_ward: Good
Level_of_cleanliness_wards: Good
comments: Test
Name: Matthew
Surname: Covarr
Level_of_cleanliness_waiting_area: Excellent
Noise_level_and_comfort: Excellent
Pain_controlled: Poor
Medication_explained: Excellent
Recommendation: Maybe

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7

Hi Walter, here you go: Feedbackform · GitHub

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8

This is very strange. I admit I have not used this Action much, but the part around line 26 and higher looks like it mirrors the list of results you are getting in mail. I cannot say how that array got built by the Action, or how to force it to match the order of variables in the form itself. If I have some time, I will play around with the Action and see if I can figure out a way to fix this. What you could try is to remove the Action from the page, publish once, and then re-add it. See if that clears it up.

Walter

On Sep 10, 2018, at 9:11 AM, Matt Covarr email@hidden wrote:

Hi Walter, here you go: Feedbackform · GitHub

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