Streaming data from different webforms

[Mikhail]

Hello there!

Love the new updates to Podio -- and have one question I can not solve myself. Thank you in advance to anyone who can help!

Our workflow is the following:

1. Clients submit an "Application" through a Podio Webform on our website

2. We review the "Application" and "approve" it, thereby starting the "registration process"

3. During the "registration process" the client is asked to submit additional webforms with things like Flight Itineraries, File Uploads, Scanned Documents

How do I make this new data (itineraries, file uploads), which is submitted through separate webforms, automatically stream into the existing "Application" entry of the client?

As of now I have:

100 entries for Applications of our clients

100 entries for flight itineraries (of those clients)

100 entries with uploaded file documents (of those clients)

... and none of these can communicate with each other. They are all housed in separate Podio apps. 

I would like the information submitted via separate webforms to automatically stream into the "Applications" app under that Client's name. Is this possible from your experience?

Thank you!
Mikhail

[Casper Fabricius]

Hi Mikhail,

That's a very interesting use case for web forms you have there. You know of course all about app references, and that fact you could link flight itineraries and file documents to applications manually as they come in. Put that would be a pain and does not scale well, I understand.

With the current limitations of web forms, you could do one of two things as I see it:

1) Make the clients write their email in all three web forms, and make sure that gets mapped to the same space contact. That will at least allow you to easily identify the flight itineraries and documents of each client later, as you can search for the email inside Podio.

2) Code a custom app that uses the Podio API. This would allow you to tailor-make the experience to your business needs, and you could easily link items together via the API. If this is a core business process it might be worth the effort.


However, Podio is also about empowering people to do advanced stuff like this without having to code, and without having to do tedious manual work such as mapping items by hand. So I'd like to ask you and other people on the list which of these two possible improvements to web forms you think would be most helpful to this and similar use cases:

1) Support for multiple web forms for the same Podio app. In this case you could build one big app with the fields for both applications, flight itinerary etc., but then have one web form that only exposed the application part of the fields, another web form that exposed the flight itinerary etc.

2) Support for hidden fields and prepulated values in the web form. In this case you could have a hidden application reference field in e.g. the flight itinerary web form, and then populate it with the id of the application using a query string. You would then send a link to the next web form with the application id in it, and flight itineraries etc. would be automatically linked to applications immediately when the web form was submitted.

Cheers,
Casper Fabricius
Developer at Podio

[Patrick Steil]

You probably knew this was coming but I think both solutions are valuable in different scenarios...   If I had to vote for one or the other, I think #1 is more important and more useful.  But I think we would also benefit by being able to pre-populate hidden fields also.

I want to offer another solution that is a variation of both #1 and #2... 

We have job applicants fill out a form with their most basic info we might need to find those we want to do an interview with... then we would add additional fields to the form and ask them to update their info, so we would like to send them a link to their webform so they could add in their answers for the new field...  so this is sending them the same pre-populated form, and gives us the ability add more fields... this would be even more useful for us than #1 or #2 and might be easier for your team to implement...

I would still in the future like the ability to do #1 so that we can be more flexible in how we use any given Podio app... 

Thanks!

patrick steil

--

Patrick Steil  |  ChurchBuzz.org

Church Website Optimization
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[Casper Fabricius]

As I was reading Patrick's suggestion I just realized one big problem with my suggestion #1: To be useful it would have to allow users not just to create items through a web form, but also to update existing items using the web form. They may not realize that's what they are doing, but that's what have to have happen for this to be useful. To make that secure, web forms that update an existing item would have to be on a "secret url", and that would force you to firstly provide this url to each client, and secondly to use the web form hosted by Podio rather than on your own site, as the one on your own would not know how to load the "secret url".

Anyway, more input on this is very welcome.

/Casper

[Patrick Steil]

Yes, that secret URL would work for me... obviously that would be a bit painful for a large number of users (but STILL beats manual data entry!)

If you allowed that secret url to be exported with all the other item data, then we could use that spreadsheet to generate a "mass email" to our users with their secret url...  :)

patrick

[Anders Bendix Kiel]

This sounds very interesting. 

If you need, I could provide another usecase for this. I actually had a potential client that decided not using Podio because of this feature of updating contact data without being on Podio wasnt possible. It sounds like this would be possible with this solution.

/Anders

[Carl-Fredrik Herö]

I would definitely say #2. This is something I have requested earlier in the Podio Partners workspace.

Regards,

Carl-Fredrik Herö,

Elvenite AB