Introduction

This feature is part of the Visforms Subscription and not available in the free Visforms version..

More flexibility of data display for additional application areas for Visforms

Using Visforms to create your forms, you can store submitted user input ins database and display submitted user inputs in a data view menu item.

The range of tasks that requires forms and that can be achieved with Visforms has grown continously and it is possible to use Visforms for a wide range of applications, tasks and use cases now. Being able to display the submitted data flexible has therefore become a must have for some tasks, espacially:

• Display data in articles or modules
• Display only record sets with specific user input values
• Display only a limited number of record sets, i.e. the 5 newest submissions
• Display only own record sets of the currently logged in user

What is a plugin and how does it work?

Joomla! supports the use of so called plugins. Plugins are small applications, which can hook into the Code at various places and perform specific tasks. For example email cloaking is a typical plugin task as well as switching languages on multi language websites.

Content Plugins can hook into article and modules of type "Custom HTML" and modify the text

Moduels of type "Custom HTML" can be used to display individual texts at a module position just as articles are used to display text at the content "postion" of your websites. For the sake of briefness I will only use the term "article" but everything said in this documenation aplies to modules of type "Custom HTML" as well.

There are different types of plugins in Joomla!, one of which are so called Content Plugins. Content Plugins can hook into the content of articles and modify the article text, just before it is displayed. So it is possible to search for a specific string, inserted in the article in the article manager, remove the string and display something totally different instead. Because this is done just before the page is displayed, Content Plugins can react on the environment of the page, for example, können den Inhalt von Beiträgen nachträglich verändern. The content plugin loadposition for example searches for a string like {loadposition bottom}, which would be replaced with real and complete modules.

This feature is very powerful, because it is up to the plugin developer to just define how the plugin string should look like. You can add custom information to the plugin string (you can add parameter) and thus control how the plugin works.

The Plugin Data View is a content plugin, used to display form data in content and control which data are displayed and how.

A gread advantage of the use of a plugin is, that we can deliver any information, used by the plugin, very easily and convieniently in a simple plugin string (which can be done swiftly and saves you the effort of managing lots of parameters in administration panels) but on the other hand you can control the plugin extremly flexible by passing parameters. A small downside of plugin string is, that you have to know exactly what the plugin string must look like and that the plugin will simply not work if you misspell the string.

What does that mean for you?

Let's fill the theory with some examples of plugin strings and how the display submitted user inputs. The code examples use our demo registration form for a sport event, with the form id 9.

Example 1

The following plugin string is replaced with user inputs of te form with the id 7 and the the form fields with ids 109, 110,111, 112 and 113. Data are displayed in a table design with individual pagination, which is set to 5 record sets per page.

{vfdataview}{"formid":"9","fieldlist":"109,110,111,112,113","display_num":"5"}{/vfdataview}

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Example 2

The following plugin string is replaced by the latest (newest) record set submitted for the form with id 9. Again the data of the fields with id 109, 110, 111, 112 and 113 are displayed but this time as a description list.

{vfdataview}{"formid":"9","count":"1","sortorder":"created","sortdirection":"desc","layout":"list","fieldlist":"109,110,111,112,113"}{/vfdataview}

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Example 3

This example displayes the female participants oft the 10 Kilometers run. So it's an example of record set selection by user input value. Only first name and second name are displayed. The following string has the effect that only female participants who have chosen to run the 10 kilometer-long race are being shown. All record sets get selected that have "w" as value in the field with id 92 and "10 Kilometer" as value in the field with id 93. First name (field id is 89) and second name (field id is 90) are getting displayed.

{vfdataview}{"formid":"9","fieldselect":{"112":"f","113":"10 Kilometer"},"fieldlist":"109,110"}{/vfdataview}

Participants of The 10 Kilometer-Long Race

There are many more parameters which you can use to control the data display in content. (For full list see Parameter list).

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