Jamie M
Member
Hi all,
What's the best way to keep a form visible after a user submits? This wouldn't remove any user-submitted details either, i.e. they can change a couple of things easily and then resubmit. So avoiding a refresh completely would be best.
Cheers,
James
No easy way to do that. You could put the form shortcode directly into the confirmation message, but it's not going to keep the fields populated from the first form.
Jamie M
Member
Hmm ok. Well perhaps this can be an Ajax feature in the future.
In the meantime, I am using my own Back button in the confirmation message like so:
<a href="history.back()" rel="nofollow">click here to go back</a>
This works perfectly in Safari, Crome, and even Opera. The information remains on the form.
Haven't tested IE yet.
Anyway, with Firefox, the fields all empty themselves upon return. It seems to do a full refresh rather than just a step back like the other browsers.
Do you have any idea how I can get around this? Is there a better method to do a step back?
I don't understand why you need to submit and go backwards anyhow. That sounds like a bad user experience to me. Maybe you need to just pass the relevant information via a querystring parameter to a new form.
The Firefox issue could be a browser privacy setting, not sure.
Jamie M
Member
The problem lies in the GF export capability. It's far too limited. I have to strike a balance between user experience and export usefulness. Yes I can make a perfect user form but the resulting CSV file is totally useless. It's a fairly complicated form btw, and unfortunately I shouldn't have ever gone with GF in the first place as I now know that it's basically a glorified contact form. Nevertheless, I have a dev account now so I will persevere.
I don't know what you're expecting with the export functionality but I'm sure plenty of people would take you to task over your comment that Gravity Forms is just a "glorified contact form". Yes, at it's core it's a form processor but if you know how to leverage all of the hooks and filters, you can do some pretty amazing things. . trust me, I've seen lots of cool, well thought out stuff built right on top of this plugin.
If you really have to go back to a previous form page for some reason, you might try using a client side script like this one to save the user's input.. I know a few people have used this one with success.
http://rikrikrik.com/jquery/autosave/
Good luck.
This is a browser issue related to how FireFox handles form field input from a security standpoint. This isn't a Gravity Forms issue.
We have no control over the back and forward functionality of the browser or how the browser handles cached versions of the information.
What you want to do is certainly possible, but it sounds like you aren't going about it the right way. Relying on the browser to handle this for you isn't the correct way to go about this because every browser is different, and this functionality may work on Safari, Chrome and Opera for you... but may not for other users based on their browser settings.
What you would want to do to accomplish what you are trying to do is implement your own customization to store the field values as cookies and then another customization to read the cookie values and dynamically populate the form fields.
You could then configure Gravity Forms so that in the form confirmation you insert the shortcode for the exact same form. When the form is submitted, it would show the same form again. If you implement the cookie and dynamic population customization I mentioned above, it would then dynamically populate the fields with the values they entered previously. They could then make changes, submit it again and the customization would then update the cookies values again and the cycle would start over again.
Gravity Forms is far from a glorified "contact form" plugin. It's an extremely powerful tool that can be customized to do just about anything you want using the large library of hooks and filters. It is never going to have EVERY feature that EVERY user wants out of the box, that is unrealistic. Just because it doesn't do something you want it to do A) doesn't mean it's "broken" or "limited" or a "glorified contact form" and B) doesn't mean it can be customized to do what you want it to do.
