Duplicate entries

There is not currently functionality that prevents duplicate post titles if you are using the Post Title field. But you can work around this using other fields and then the content template functionality of the Post Title field.

- Add a Single Input field to your form, use this field for the user to enter the title of the post.
- Edit the Single Input field, select the "No Duplicates" checkbox under the Rules
- Add a Post Title field to your form
- Select the Content Template feature of the Post Title field and from the "Insert form field" drop down, select the Single Input field you created above. If it doesn't appear in the drop down, you may need to first save your form and then choose Continue Editing and then edit the Post Title field and configure the Content Template.
- Edit the Post Title field again, choose the Advanced Tab and set the visibility to Admin Only
- Save your form

What this will now do is the user will enter the title of their post in a Single Input field that has a No Duplicates rule, meaning it won't allow duplicates. Duplicates being other form submissions that already exist, NOT existing Posts. If no duplicate it is found the form will be submitted and the Post Title will use the value of this field as it's value when creating the post.

So it's a workaround that can work, although the no duplicates is only against existing form entries and not existing posts you may have when this is implemented.

I will look into adding no duplicates as an option on the Post Title field in the 1.5.3 release.

Doing it this way it will only trigger the duplicates validation if the post was created using the form. It actually does the duplication validation against the Form Entry data in this scenario, not the actual Posts.

You can't prevent duplicates per person as a built in feature. The no duplicates option is for all form submissions, not specific people. In order to do something like this you would have to write your own custom validation using the gform_validation hook. You'd have to query your data to see if an entry exists with that value and that users email address (or user id if you are going by a logged in user) and trigger validation if there is a duplicate.

A tutorial on how to use the gform_validation hook can be found here:

http://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/page/Using_the_Gravity_Forms_%22gform_valiation%22_Hook

Ultimately you'd have to write the custom code necessary to do this type of validation, the tutorial is only going to provide you an example of how to use the gform_validation hook itself.