Form Submissions Don't Preserve Field Order

[maryjos]

The way form submissions are handled, the field sort order is not preserved and can appear out of order for emails and when viewing submissions in the admin. This can particularly be an issue with larger forms where the order is critical to parsing through the information.

[maryjos]

I'm actually working on my own form builder (for another OSS CMS) and was testing this one to kind of get some ideas and noticed this issue. Here's the rundown of my solution for it, if you want to implement it.

For the field name on the rendered form, I used both the field name as well as its sort order in the form. Like this: "field#sortorder#~#name# (I prefer to replace spaces in the name with underscores as well as it's more valid)

Then when processing the form, I loop over the form struct, and for any field that has a ListLen of 2 with that tilde separator, I know it's one of the fields I need to capture. I move it into structs to hold the field names and the data like this:

var strFormNames = {};
var strFormData = {};
for (var field IN form) {
if ( ListLen( field, "") IS 2 ) {
var sortOrder = ReplaceNoCase( ListGetAt( field, 1, ""), "field", "" );
var fieldName = ListGetAt( field, 2, "~");
var fieldData = form[ field ];
strFormNames[ fieldName ] = sortOrder;
strFormData[ fieldName ] = form[field];
}
}

I can then sort the field names struct on the sortOrder which will return an array of the fields in sorted order:

var arrSortedForm = structSort(strFormNames, "numeric");

To get the data for the submission, I then loop over the array and create a struct for each field, retrieve its data from the other struct I created and store that into a new array:

var arrSortedData = arrayNew(1);
for (var item IN arrSortedForm) {
var newStruct = { name=item, data=strFormData[item] };
arrayAppend(arrSortedData, newStruct);
}

And now I have a sorted array with just the fields from my form builder to send to JSON. So this not only handles keeping the fields sorted, but makes sure I don't get anything else I will have to exclude in output later:

Submission.setData(serializeJSON(arrSortedForm));

The one thing I'm still not quite happy with is that I am getting all caps for the field names, I'm guessing that's the framework I am using (FW/1) that is responsible for that. You may or may not have that issue, but it's certainly possible to use the field ID instead of the name and do a lookup on the name so you have the actual field name in proper case to store with the submission.

[gratzc]

Thanks for the suggestions. We will see if we can get those implemented in the next version. Appreciate the feedback.