Freeform submit & pre-populate again

Question

Have a curly one for those who know more then me.

Picture this: A site has a form to submit a warranty registration. Capture: Name, email, street address, model name and serial number.

All good,this first part is a no-brainer. Fill out the stuff, submit, fire off thankyou emails to client and company then return to a generic "thanks" page.

What the client seeks though, is rarely, straight forward but must be achievable.

Let's alter the params for a moment. Let's say the user has bought several machines and they want to register each of them. Initial thought is to create say 6 duplicate fields in Freeform (6 X machine name, 6 X serial name) and display them – but a tad redundant to show all 6 if they bought 1 or what happens if they bought 12 ? Plus, too many fields to manage in the backend.

It was suggested that the user fills out all the "personal" details and we only display 1 set of machine/serial fields.

The user then has the choice of 2 buttons, either #1 "submit, I only bought one" or #2 "submit this one and then I'll add another"

If they choose option #2, how could you bring back all the previous "personal" details pre-populated and present a new, empty set of fields for machine/serial#?

Long story short, user submits one entry for one machine (one record per machine, technically speaking), if they choose to submit another, their "personal" details are pre-populated ready for another product registration - how ?

As I write, I see stash in the equation but not sure how to set the variables until they're posted… a good Friday question :)

Answer 1

Freeform lets you use the %%entry_id%% placeholder in the return parameter. You could use this to load the entry that was just submitted (with the freeform:entries tag), then populate your personal info with at entry (but exclude the info for the products being registered).

What I'd do is include a checkbox in your initial form for "I have more products to register". Then, on your resulting page, if that box was checked for the first entry, show a new form with the info pre-populated. If it was not, then just show the "thank you" message.

Assuming this:

• you have the aforementioned checkbox and it's named registration_multiple
• your initial Freeform Form tag has return="warranty/submitted/%%entry_id%%

... here is some quick pseudo-code for your warranty/submitted template:

{exp:freeform:entries entry_id="{segment_3}" limit="1"}
{if registration_multiple == 'y'}
    {exp:freeform:form form_id="1" `return="warranty/submitted/%%entry_id%%"}
        <input type="text" name="name" value="{name}" />
        <input type="email" name="email" value="{email}" />
        ... etc ..
    {/exp:freeform:form}
{if:else}
    <p>Thank you for registering your product!</p>
{/if}
{/exp:freeform_entries}

Answer 2

You could switch from using Freeform to using Safecracker and storing these in entries.

You can use a Matrix field for each product they're registering, and give them a + button to add new rows to their Matrix fields using JavaScript.

We did this with an event registration site, where there was a primary registrant and they would add multiple attendees to their registration within 1 form.

As described in this answer, you can then trigger the notification emails when the Safecracker form is submitted.