Merge Tags in entry limit message

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the quick reply. Basically, I built a portal for one of my clients so that members of their marketing department can review purchase orders and submit an approval request to their boss for sign-off using one of my forms. The admin notification is actually setup to email the boss with the embed_url so he can click the link, open the PDF purchase order, digitally sign it, and click to send the signed version back by email (using Adobe's submit to email funcitonality). Because there are over 150 market pages (actually category pages) that currently have a purchase order in process, or will in the near future, the ability to use the same form is a big time saver.

Anyway, I've been using this form without an entry limit for a while, and while it works as intended, the only negative feedback from my client is that there's no way for the marketing managers to know if a purchase order approval request has already been submitted for a given market because the form is always active.

As for background, I've tried approaching this by restricting entries based on the submission IP address (my clients all work from the same office) with this snippit from Rob, along with a gform_field_value_$parameter_name filter to check against the category in the embed_url (this form is actually embedded in the category descriptions of multiple child-category pages, each representing a different territory and sub-market), but unfortunately no dice. I started a priority support ticket 8/16 and thought I was close to having a solution, but the ticket was actually closed last Friday because my request ended up being "a bit outside the realm of Gravity Forms".

So, long story short, I'm back to square one with duplicating and modifying this form for each category page. It is less efficient, but it looks like the only way to limit the number of entries and replace the form with an "already submitted" notification so the marketing managers know what has been processed and what is still outstanding. My desire to use merge tags to pull the email address and date into the notification message is so there will be a record of who submitted the approval request and a time-stamp for when it was submitted.

To avoid having to add new functions/filters each I duplicate the form, I'm thinking that a shortcode might be the best approach here, but I'd like to get your thoughts based on my usage scenario.

Please let me know if any additional info would be helpful. Thanks!