Display an edit link instead of the form
Note: These features are part of the Visforms Subscription and are not included in the free Visforms version.
It is often desired that a user should only be able to fill out and submit a form once. If he has already filled out the form once, he should only be able to edit the data he has already submitted. This process can be implemented with the Visforms Subscription.
Form option “Show edit link instead of form”
To do this, use the form option “Edit link instead of form”, which you can find in the form configuration under the “General” tab. The form option is just above the description input field. Set this option to “yes” if you want to use the feature.
Other conditions must be met
There are a few more conditions that must be met for Visforms to recognize
- which data belongs to which user and
- whether a user has previously submitted the form.
Only then is Visforms able to actually display the link to the “Edit Data” view and not the form itself. So please read the following list carefully.
Configuration settings
- Set the form option “Edit link instead of form” under the “General” tab to “yes”.
- Set the form option “Save result” under the “Result” tab to “yes”.
- Only transmissions from a registered user can later be reassigned to the user. Make sure only logged-in users can submit the form. To do this, use the “Access levels” form options, for example, in conjunction with the corresponding access level of the menu item via which the form is displayed.
- Visforms allows displaying an edit data view only if a Visforms » Data View with Edit Link type menu item is present on the web page.
It is not necessary for the menu containing this entry to be published via a module. You can also use a “hidden” menu.
But the menu item must exist and its status must be “Published”.
In addition, the user must have sufficient rights to view this menu item.
So create a menu item of type Visforms » Data View with Edit Link for the form. - Normal registered users usually do not have the right to publish Visforms data.
In these cases, he can only view his own record if it is published.
This corresponds exactly to Joomla’s behavior when posting and editing articles from the frontend.
Set the form option “Publish data automatically” under the tab “Data display in frontend” to “yes”.
Suppose you want to ensure that the submitted form data can only be viewed via the data-editing views in the frontend. In this case you should set the option “Allow frontend data view” to “no”. This does not affect the visibility of the data in the edit view. - Make sure that the user group of users who can view, fill out and submit the form has the “Edit my data” permission. You set this on the “Permissions” tab in the form configuration.
If all conditions are met
If all the conditions listed above are met, the following will happen to a logged-in user who has already submitted the form once. Instead of the form, the user sees a short explanatory text and a link to the “Edit data” view. Both the explanatory text and the link text are fixed texts at the moment, but they can be overwritten using Joomla’s language manager.
These are the following two language tags
- COM_VISFORMS_REDIRECT_TO_EDIT_VIEW_TEXT and
- COM_VISFORMS_EDIT_LINK_TEXT.