Designing a Form

Wednesday 12 December 2007 11:21:49 am

I would like to design a form that would gather information from an anonymous user (validating this info), save this info in the database and send a customized e-mail with the information gathered.

Could someone point me out the best way to do this? I know I can define the content class for the form structure but I don't know how to flesh out the form capture screen base on the content class and also how to validate and send an e-mail during the form processing pipeline.

Thank you.

Wednesday 12 December 2007 10:35:27 pm

If you want to accomplish that by yourself, you would need to study eZ a bit one way, or the other.

The default way is to create a class that would collect information (info collector flag of a class attribute). More info:
http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/3_10/concepts_and_basics/content_management/information_collection
You don't worry that much about validation in such case, it's taken care of if you use built-in attribute data types.

Alternatively, you may prepare your own extension with a module/view for displaying/receiving data and deal with everything on your own. That requires more knowledge and also PHP programming.

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Thursday 13 December 2007 12:49:40 pm

1. What exactly do you want to change about validation messages?
2. This one actually I don't know out of the box, but I'm sure enough it would be possible if you study the templates. Out of curiosity, what is wrong about that confirmation behavior?
3. Where should the e-mail go? Look at the settings/collect.ini file configuration options.

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Company: mediaSELF Sp. z o.o., http://www.mediaself.pl
eZ references: http://ez.no/partners/worldwide_partners/mediaself
eZ certified developer: http://ez.no/certification/verify/272585
eZ blog: http://ez.ryba.eu

Thursday 13 December 2007 2:12:29 pm

The first point is already, in my opinion, reason good enough to move towards own dedicated form extension. It might be possible to override default template behavior for collecting info of particular class, but the truth is any serious logical operations, decisions, validation should be performed in PHP rather than in the presentation layer (templates). And information collection mechanism is very handy, but quite simple as the matter of fact.

In such case, I'd create an extension with custom module views that handle form displaying and validation, and a custom persistent dataset (database table) for storing any results. All of your problems will have straightforward solutions then, as long as you can handle them properly in PHP and as a extenson.

Dig the net and ez.no if you need more info on info on the above.
Good luck!

--
Company: mediaSELF Sp. z o.o., http://www.mediaself.pl
eZ references: http://ez.no/partners/worldwide_partners/mediaself
eZ certified developer: http://ez.no/certification/verify/272585
eZ blog: http://ez.ryba.eu