Loops in Forms

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MPForm Documentation: Loops in forms

Level of difficulty: C 

If you ever tried to do programming tasks, you probably know what a loop means in the flow of a program. If not, just imagine you have to put a question like "list the names, birth dates and some more data of your childs" into a form, with a separate field for each data element. The possible range of childs goes from 0 up a very large number. At least you should get the idea now:
You need to loop through the same page of the form until the answer to the question "Have you more children?" is No.

Now how can you do this with a Website Baker form?

• On the page which comes before the looping page, you put an option field "Do you have any children" with the possible answers Yes and No.
• On the page with the loop, you put an option field "Do you have more children" with the possible answers Yes and No as last question.
• In the file private.php you find a function private_function_on_success. I already prepared it so all you need to do is set the 8 predefined variables with the correct values. You find all those values in the Backend of MPForm.

And ready is your form loop.

Now you had some hundred visitors who entered lots of data into your large multi page form, and you need to make some statistics.

The best way to offer the data in the frontend is by using the csvexport module. Take care of its security hints!

Each line in the csv file will represent the answers from one user for all pages with the same Name suffix for results table set in the backend. When creating a multi page form, it makes sense to use the same suffix for each page of the form, and for no other form! Do not change the suffix after you added fields to a form!

Website Baker knows which entries to put in which line because of the session id. So even if multiple users fill out forms at the same time, there will be no mix up of data.

But how about a looping form page, will the same fields from the first child be overwritten with data from the second child? The answer is no, because the function private_function_on_success appends some char to the session id after each loop in your code. Further childs will be written into new rows. When there are 3 children, the session id might look as follows, for instance:

• form until first child: w63fr46t
• secod child: w63fr46t_
• third child: w63fr46t__
• rest of the form: w63fr46t

Matching all children of the user is no problem because the first 8 chars of the session id are constant for that user.