[Pro] PHP Forms

Freeway
1

I am working on this form for a customer. Is there anyway to have a form display in the email like the form? Right now it displays as a long list.

http://www.jrobinsondesign.com/wmtest/contractorquote.html

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2

You will find varying levels of support for a form of any kind in an e-mail message. I think you will be better off coding this as a page that’s hosted on a server somewhere. You can show a picture of your form, but make it a link to the actual form on the server, opened in a real browser. Even webmail clients like Gmail and Outlook.com will either bowdlerize or frankly mangle your form elements. Forget any sort of JavaScript validation or other niceties, too – so once they enter anything wrong, you will have to re-present the form in a browser anyway for them to make any corrections. Why go to all that work twice?

Walter

On Sep 18, 2013, at 10:10 AM, John Robinson wrote:

I am working on this form for a customer. Is there anyway to have a form display in the email like the form? Right now it displays as a long list.

http://www.jrobinsondesign.com/wmtest/contractorquote.html

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3

Not with the standard action.

You could tweak the action (or the action output) to get something closer but if you want something that outputs something more like the look of the page you might want to look at a service like Wufoo. http://www.wufoo.com/

Alternatively you can build a form with Acrobat (pro) - or whatever they call the cloud version.

David

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4

Forgot to mention – there’s no Back button in an e-mail application, either. No way to follow the usual “you made some errors, please press Back and fix them” pattern.

Walter

On Sep 18, 2013, at 10:15 AM, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

Why go to all that work twice?

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5

Thanks for the quick response. Much apperciated. In the customers old site they used a web based form service. Just hate to go that route. Did notice that it also goes to a list on the email but with a highlites for every other line. Can I do this to assist in reading the email information.
Hope this makes sense

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6

Are you talking about the result from the form, or the form itself? I thought you meant that the form was going to be presented to the person who was filling it out within the context of an e-mail message. If you are talking about the results of the form, being sent to your client, then no, neither of the current Actions provide that sort of user-friendly report view. And both of them send a plain-text e-mail message so there’s no opportunity for styling there either.

Walter

On Sep 18, 2013, at 10:24 AM, John Robinson wrote:

Thanks for the quick response. Much apperciated. In the customers old site they used a web based form service. Just hate to go that route. Did notice that it also goes to a list on the email but with a highlites for every other line. Can I do this to assist in reading the email information.
Hope this makes sense

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7

Thanks, I think I understand. So a column will not show up in the results?

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8

All simple PHP form handlers follow this basic pattern:

  1. The form is sent to the handler as an array of key/value pairs, following the HTML order of the form page. If you have laid out your form in a table, these will follow the row/column hierarchy of the original page layout pretty clearly, but they will still be in linear order.
  2. The form handler steps through this array, and assigns each key as a variable name, and each value as a value (naturally enough).
  3. The resulting e-mail will be a string of plain text, with one line of text per field; the name to the left of a colon, and the value to the right, followed by a line-feed or two.

To get something richer than this, you would need to code your own form handler. I have built these before, and they can be fairly daunting programming exercises, as you have to account for missing values and not show blank fields. You can end up with a bunch of if/then/else statements to account for all the variety possible within even legal form entries, not to mention all the illegal stuff you have to handle gracefully.

The magic of the Action is that the content of the form doesn’t really matter. But it does shift the burden on to the human trying to squint their way through the report.

Walter

On Sep 18, 2013, at 10:38 AM, John Robinson wrote:

Thanks, I think I understand. So a column will not show up in the results?

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9

Walter
Thanks for clarity. Will pass this on to the customer and get busy experimenting. John

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