I need to create a lookup field on a form for a client. What i'd like to do is first load a page with a single text entry field where the user enters a town name. I then want to check that name against a database table, and if it exists forward the user onto step 2 of the form where they can complete the rest, if not then display a message saying their area is not supported.
I'd like to do this all within contour, instead of creating the first step as a separate form (which would be easy via a user control, but not my ideal choice as i have contour to leverage, so why not i say.
My questions:
1. what would be the best way to achieve this? I'd like to make it generic enough to reuse any new control types i create (perhaps by entering a table name and field name to a config).
2. are there any examples available of this being done before?
3. Best way to make the data in the lookup table viewable and editable by the client. I'd like to keep this within the contour section too - is it hard to add a new node to the contour tree, either a new node or under the current Data Sources node?
4. how can i reference the value entered in step 1 in both step 2 of the form (to prepopulate a field), and in the email sent to the customer (this would be achieved already if the form is prepolated)?
I think the best way to do this would be to create a custom field type that does the lookup, although you'd probably have to do the lookup with AJAX, or roll in a custom validator into your field so that you can set Page.IsValid = false if the area isn't found (if you use a custom validator you'll need to set the validationgroup for it, or it'll be ignored. There's some talk about how to do that here: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/umbraco-pro/contour/12731-Default-ValidationGroup-name).
As for editing the data, I'd maybe look at either adding a separate section in umbraco for it rather than having it as part of contour (although there's nothing stopping you from adding it to the contour tree that I can think of), it should just be the same as adding an item to any of the other trees in the CMS.
for 4) I think you'd be looking at maybe another custom field type and the email could either be done with the default contour email builder (as long as the entered value is saved in the form, it can be added to an email) or via a custom workflow if you need more customisation.
Thanks heaps for the info. I have had a read through the documentation (found it after i posted the above), and thought of this as an approach: I create a custom field type, which is bound to a data source as per a normal field type. The custom type will accept a parameter of "Validation Failure Value", which i give a value such as -1. Then when i create the field type, i'll bind it to the list of available towns, and add a "Not Found" value, with a value of -1. The field type's validator only checks to ensure that this value is not selected. If it is, then an error message displays (I thought i'd make the error message a parameter too, so i could enter some custome html to display on failure)
This seems like a pretty neat way to do it, without having to do too much development (its for a charity so i'm trying to do it on the cheap as much as possible). The one thing i'm not entirely sure about is how the validation works... I assume if validation fails, the next button will be disabled? If this is the case, then i can put the rest of the form in step 2 of the form, and step 1 has only the town lookup.
I'm going to give this a go tomorrow, so i'll let you know how i progress.. let me know if you see anything wrong with my proposed approach (and perhaps save me chasing my tail unnecessarily) :)
It could be because i'm not assigning my control to the right validation group, but i can't find which one i should assign it too. There could be more to it than that, so i'd love to see a working sample of something similar being achieved.
So yeah all is looking good... i have my custom field type, custom web control, validation firing perfectly. If validation successful, we can go to the rest of the form, if not display error message with some information for the user.
Now to build the rest of the form, and refer to the value selected in this step, which i think should be fairly straight forward. :)
I may have some issues displaying HTML info from my web control as the error message (instead of just flat text)... I'll keep you posted on that one
Yup, as i suspected i'm having trouble displaying html error messages.
It turns out Contour is stripping all HTML values i enter into the field type settings. I'll work around this for now by using a string with placeholders, and do some funky replacement in the web control.. its ugly but it will work.
For future, any chance of getting the ability to pass html through to our custom field types? I've tried HtmlEncoding what i enter there, but Contour still strips it.
Phew, almost there... last thing i need to sort out is the town name. It seems using the bracket syntax {yourtown} returns the ID of the selected value, not the Text value itself.
This is strange as the value displayed in the collected data shows the town name, not the ID. Is there a trick to get the name instead of the ID?
Best way to create a lookup field
Hey all,
I need to create a lookup field on a form for a client. What i'd like to do is first load a page with a single text entry field where the user enters a town name. I then want to check that name against a database table, and if it exists forward the user onto step 2 of the form where they can complete the rest, if not then display a message saying their area is not supported.
I'd like to do this all within contour, instead of creating the first step as a separate form (which would be easy via a user control, but not my ideal choice as i have contour to leverage, so why not i say.
My questions:
1. what would be the best way to achieve this? I'd like to make it generic enough to reuse any new control types i create (perhaps by entering a table name and field name to a config).
2. are there any examples available of this being done before?
3. Best way to make the data in the lookup table viewable and editable by the client. I'd like to keep this within the contour section too - is it hard to add a new node to the contour tree, either a new node or under the current Data Sources node?
4. how can i reference the value entered in step 1 in both step 2 of the form (to prepopulate a field), and in the email sent to the customer (this would be achieved already if the form is prepolated)?
Thanks heaps
Greg
Hi Greg,
I think the best way to do this would be to create a custom field type that does the lookup, although you'd probably have to do the lookup with AJAX, or roll in a custom validator into your field so that you can set Page.IsValid = false if the area isn't found (if you use a custom validator you'll need to set the validationgroup for it, or it'll be ignored. There's some talk about how to do that here: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/umbraco-pro/contour/12731-Default-ValidationGroup-name).
As for creating a custom field, there's some good stuff in the documentation about it: http://umbraco.org/products/umbraco-contour/help-and-support/developer-documentation and there's also the handy open source field type/workflow package in the package library that contains the code for how all the default ones work, which can be downloaded here: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/umbraco-contour-shared-source
As for editing the data, I'd maybe look at either adding a separate section in umbraco for it rather than having it as part of contour (although there's nothing stopping you from adding it to the contour tree that I can think of), it should just be the same as adding an item to any of the other trees in the CMS.
for 4) I think you'd be looking at maybe another custom field type and the email could either be done with the default contour email builder (as long as the entered value is saved in the form, it can be added to an email) or via a custom workflow if you need more customisation.
Hope that's useful!
:)
Hey Tim,
Thanks heaps for the info. I have had a read through the documentation (found it after i posted the above), and thought of this as an approach: I create a custom field type, which is bound to a data source as per a normal field type. The custom type will accept a parameter of "Validation Failure Value", which i give a value such as -1. Then when i create the field type, i'll bind it to the list of available towns, and add a "Not Found" value, with a value of -1. The field type's validator only checks to ensure that this value is not selected. If it is, then an error message displays (I thought i'd make the error message a parameter too, so i could enter some custome html to display on failure)
This seems like a pretty neat way to do it, without having to do too much development (its for a charity so i'm trying to do it on the cheap as much as possible). The one thing i'm not entirely sure about is how the validation works... I assume if validation fails, the next button will be disabled? If this is the case, then i can put the rest of the form in step 2 of the form, and step 1 has only the town lookup.
I'm going to give this a go tomorrow, so i'll let you know how i progress.. let me know if you see anything wrong with my proposed approach (and perhaps save me chasing my tail unnecessarily) :)
Cheers
Greg
I think that sounds ok! Let me know how you get on.
:)
Ugh... this has been really really tedious to do. Not enough working examples out there means i've had to fumble my way through it...
So far i've done the following:
Fixed it.. my solution is here: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/umbraco-pro/contour/12731-Default-ValidationGroup-name?p=0#comment48011
So yeah all is looking good... i have my custom field type, custom web control, validation firing perfectly. If validation successful, we can go to the rest of the form, if not display error message with some information for the user.
Now to build the rest of the form, and refer to the value selected in this step, which i think should be fairly straight forward. :)
I may have some issues displaying HTML info from my web control as the error message (instead of just flat text)... I'll keep you posted on that one
Yup, as i suspected i'm having trouble displaying html error messages.
It turns out Contour is stripping all HTML values i enter into the field type settings. I'll work around this for now by using a string with placeholders, and do some funky replacement in the web control.. its ugly but it will work.
For future, any chance of getting the ability to pass html through to our custom field types? I've tried HtmlEncoding what i enter there, but Contour still strips it.
Phew, almost there... last thing i need to sort out is the town name. It seems using the bracket syntax {yourtown} returns the ID of the selected value, not the Text value itself.
This is strange as the value displayed in the collected data shows the town name, not the ID. Is there a trick to get the name instead of the ID?
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