Forms

[Cassie]

Hi all,

For those of you running the Active Campus CMS, what are you doing for
forms? We found that without CGI scripting or e-mail capabilities,
it's nearly impossible to retrieve information that users submit on
those forms.

So we've ditched the CMS forms and are looking for other options. I'm
curious if anyone else is working through it or is using something
else altogether.

Thanks,
Cassie
Laramie County Community College

[Robert Leeper]

We've gone round and round with Datatel over this issue.
Unfortunately, since the templates for the CMS all have forms that
wrap around the entire page, you can't just add any old form onto the
page, as nesting forms doesn't work. As a result, we have been using
TFMail or custom-written PHP forms that either pop up upon clicking a
link (poor and annoying option) or are iframes (at times, an even
worse option). The - dare I say it - advantage of doing it this way is
that iframes aren't parsed as being part of the page, so they are not
considered "inside" the containing form. The same is true about the
pop up window, so long as the whole page that gets popped up is custom-
written, rather than just another CMS page.

Hope this helps... and makes any sense at all. If not, I'll try to
take another stab at it.

Robert Leeper

[Jay B]

This has been a challenge for us too. We are migrating to CMS still
from a Cold Fusion legacy site. After an attempt to manage an event
with a form from the CMS did not go as planned, we reverted back to
the legacy method. Going back to legacy was due to the difficulty to
extract or report on all the data collected in the form. At this
time we're still planning to use Cold Fusion in similar cases until we
understand better how to report on and distribute results from the
forms. Continuing to use Cold Fusion allowa allows for us to
distribute results via email and store the results in data files to
report in greater detail.

As for integrating CMS pages with CFML pages, we too are relying on an
iframe or new window for now. Which is not the best options but keeps
us in business.

Jason Black
Salve Regina University

> > Laramie County Community College- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[branhap]

I know of one school that actually has their own .NET code embedded in
the application. Once we have our dev server up and running (it's been
ordered woohoo!) I plan on starting down this road as well.

In the mean time, often times, we find it easiest to create an account
who only has access to that form data, set up their view to include
all the fields, and do an export into Excel. (Please note, that the
export is limited to the first 500 characters though of a full blown
text area box).

Paul