Hello All

I just purchased Dynamic Forms and am trying to use it to create a basic form. I have the usual DNN database and also an extraneous database which is going to be the focus of all my queries. Initially, here is what I want to do:

1. Be able to retrieve data from a SQL string and populate text boxes or labels (preferred) with the data.

2. Create a drop down combo box with contents from a sql query.

3. Pass the parameters to a next page and create input text boxes. However, there is a catch here. On the opening page, I ask the user to input the number of records he wants to enter and on the basis of that, I create the number of text boxes that I want. Each of these text boxes have numeric validations on it i.e. they cannot accept non numeric content and they auto-reformat the data to 2 places of decimal.

I used to do this all with classic ASP. Could you please advise, how I would start on this in Dynamic forms. Also, how would I get the connection string to point to the database of my choice.

Hi. Great let me see if I can answer some of your questions.

1. There is no way to populate 'labels' but you can populate textbox or any fields with SQL. I believe under Advanced Field Options there is a 'Default Value'. This can either be text based or SQL based. The request to pull in labels from SQL queries has never come up as a request but if you really needed it you could possibly change one of the stored procedures to maybe inner join to another table for the labels or something. For the textbox or hidden fields though you can pull in the default value.

2. Also for field types such as Check Box Lists, Dropdownlists, Radio Buttons, List Box and so forth there is the option to use sql to pull in the text and value options. I believe the example used for 'SQL Options' is to pull in the Regions from the Lists table but you can use whatever query you want. Just return a column called QuestionOption and QuestinoOptionValue. Additionally, keep in mind that you can use tokens within your query. You can use tokens from other previous fields (the short field name such as $(FName) could be used in a query that represents the first name field etc... Additionally there is a full list of available parameters you can use such as $(UserID), $(CurrentLanguage), $(PortalID), $(ModuleID), etc.... Just remember that any 'text' column needs to have ' before and after it and any integer column does not.

3. Well this can be somewhat troublesome... Is there a chance that they would enter '5' or '10' or would it be more like 1, 2, 3? What you can do is setup 3 seperate pages (one form with 1 field, another with 2, another with 3, etc...). Then one the first page ask the user 'How many would you like to enter?". Then you can create a completion event to redirect the user to different pages based on their response. So you would setup one event that if they chose 'One' redirect them to page one, same for two and three etc... You can setup as few or as many of these completion events as possible and the specific event I am referring to is the URL redirection based on users response to a field. As far as passing field values to the other pages, there is an option (for the first page) under advanced field options to 'Pass field via querystring' or 'Pass field via session variable'. The variable is based on the fields short field name. Then there is an option (for the other page) to 'Retrieve field from querystring' or 'Retrieve field from session variable'. This option allows you to pass fields between pages. IF you don't want the field to exist on the 2nd page (to the user) you could always make it a hidden field type and so forth so that you have access to all of the tokens you need for email events or whatever event you might want to execute. Just make sure to have the short field names be the same on both pages (so if its FName on page one, you could make a field with the short field name of FName on page two and pass variables between them).

Hope you find this useful. As far as connecting to the database, you might have to setup a linked server. As long as you can connect (under Host, SQL) or in some type of SQL connection between them you should be fine to connect within DYnamic Forms. If its on the same server you can probably just 'Select from YourDatabase.dbo.OtherTable'

-Chad