What is a client-friendly way to handle multi-part forms with workflow?

Question

I'm looking for some advice on a client-friendly way to create and administer multi-part forms with the caveat that a workflow process is also needed. I know more than one of the forms add-ons for EE offer multi-part forms, and they certainly make form composition/editing simple, but I'm struggling with how I would handle another part of my client's need: workflow. The idea is that the form will be available to a logged in member to complete in parts if needed (i.e. they can come back and edit their form response as many times as needed, saving their progress as they make changes) but once they submit the form for "approval" the form is no longer available for them to edit.

Has anyone attempted this with one of the available forms add-ons? Can one of them do this, or would I be better off looking at Safecracker (recognizing that it will be harder to build the editability of the form itself, but easier to handle the workflow requirement)?

Answer 1

I've used DevDemon's Forms and Solspace's Freeform Pro and they both seem to store the actual form in their own database tables so I'm not sure how you could use SafeCracker with such a set up.

Freeform Pro is what I'd use for a multipart form now, as it has a pretty slick and clean interface (although I have a wish list for this addon) - that said I'd personally try a few of them out.

Where's you'll fall down is on integrating workflow, there's only really Better Workflow but that works on entries - so it wouldn't work with the addon specific tables...

Another addon to look out for if you're using SafeCracker is MX Notifier Control - you could form a pretty solid entry workflow setup form that - although again, I can't see how it would work with one of the form addons.

Answer 2

Give your entries an status of 'pending' once they are submitted.
Then in your template, only show the form is the status isn't 'pending'.

I haven't tried this using any third party form addons but since you can do this with Safecracker, I'd assume it's possible with a more full-featured form add-on.

Answer 3

I suspect that for forms workflow you might have to write a custom addon. Forms, Freeform Pro, and Proform all have custom hooks that you can integrate with; you could write an extension to allow a logged-in user to save an incomplete form and then return to it later.

If you needed to allow for NON-logged-in users, that might be a little harder; you'd have to do something complicated with cookies.

You could also, depending on your browser requirements, just use Javascript: cookies and the Local Storage API (possibly with a polyfill) could get you everything you needed.