MachForm Community Forums » MachForm 3

1. hgmd2005
   Member

   Lock Paragraph field from being edited by the user. Or a way to insert additional paragraphs on forms that will also be available on the emails.

   Posted 12 years ago #

2. williamansley
   Member

   I would like to see this feature added, as well. The issue is that if explanatory text is added to a form using a section break field, this information is not placed into the submission email or the entries web page. This is fine if the only people reviewing the submissions from the form are completely familiar with its purpose, but if outside people need to review the submitted information, they will need to see the explanatory text just as much as the people filling out the form in the first place. We have this exact situation at my institution: information is being submitted to Machform forms and then the submissions are being made available to a review committee. The members of the committee need the data they are seeing to be fully explained. I have been able to work around this by not using any section breaks in my form, but is has resulted in making the output more clumsy and less clear than I would like. If I could have made the section breaks appear in the submission data for the forms, it would have made things much easier. I *do* think that this should be an option for each section break; I'm sure some people do not want all the section break text appearing in their form submissions.

   POSSIBLE WORKAROUND: While writing the above, it just occurred to me that another possible work around is to create paragraph fields that contain the same text as your section breaks and make them admin only, so they cannot be edited (or seen by) the users submitting the form, but will appear in the submission data. I just tested this and it seems to work, however, this is a very kludgy workaround and I would really like to see the requested feature above implemented.

   Posted 12 years ago #

3. AMurray
   Pro Member

   I don't know if my suggestions would help but.....

   Maybe you could incorporate the explanation paragraphs into the forms using the Section Break method, but also intermix the explanation paragraphs (manually) by inserting that text into the email templates. The email messages (i.e. auto-responses) are customisable, and you can include a mixture of normal text/HTML as well as the field name template tags.

   E.g.

   Explanation Text

   {fieldname_x}

   Explanation text

   {fieldname_x}

   Explanation text

   {fieldname_x}
   ....

   etc.

   You have pretty much complete control over the email templates, and including basic HTML formatting should make it a reasonable layout for the message (but only if HTML email, if plain text the result might be more 'clunky' for the amount of information it appears you will have.

   Not sure how to do the rest i.e. have the explanation text submitted with the rest of the form into the 'Entries' section.

   Posted 12 years ago #

4. hgmd2005
   Member

   Only problem I have with section break text is it not the best editable area, that is I can't Bold make text larger or bullet items.

   Posted 12 years ago #

5. AMurray
   Pro Member

   You can insert standard HTML tags in the Section Break field, such as <strong> for bold <style="font-size:.....">. You can probably use
   <ul> and <li> as well. for unordered lists.

   Granted it doesn't have a visual editor way of doing that, but if you know a little HTML it should be easy.

   Posted 12 years ago #

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