Edit Visforms Data in Frontend - Introduction
This feature is part of the Visforms Subscription and not available in the free Visforms version..
Due to great flexibility, which allows you to create many different types of forms, Visforms is often used for features which would usually require the use of a specific Joomla! component. When you offer only a single event you may use Visforms for the event registration instead of a complex event component which simple feels "to big". Or you may use Visforms to sell a product or two, because a full shop solutions is overwhelming in your case.
As a result of these uses, the demand to be able to modify submitted user inputs after they were stored, espcially in the front end, increased and with the Visforms extension "Edit Data in Frontend" this is possible now.
Some things which you should think about, when using this extension
There is a big difference between a custom component for a specific task and an "application made by Visforms". A custom component for a specific task usually has fixed structure, fixed forms and exactly one business logic.
On the other hand Visforms allows you to combine everything with everything and even to change the form definition after the first user data are already stored (and these are totally sensible use cases). Whereas a specified component is able to and focuses on making sure that the validity of submitted data cannot be broken (at the expense of flexibility), the structure of Visforms as a flexible form generator makes this task impossible.
Heads Up! If you use Visforms to create something like a small application for your individual tasks and store, display and edit user inputs you have to make sure, that you do not change the form definition in a way that may result in inconsitent data. Visforms will not prevent you from changing the form and field definitions even if there are already data stored with this form and even if this will result in invalid data which will affect the display of the data and the ability to edit the data!!!
Such changes could be:
- Change field type
- Make field required
- Add validation rules like minimum length, maximum length
- Remove the multiselect option from a field of type select
- Change option values for select, checkbox group, radio button option lists
- ...