Anyway to build a form outside of Business Catalyst and connect it to the platform?

[RoosterInk]

I am trying to do one of two thing to accomplish what I am trying to do. First I am trying to build an order form that allows a user to add a field as they go. So if I have three fields for one product. One for a product name, one for a SKU number, and one for a quantity. I would like the user to be able to fill this out and then if they have more products to add they can click a button that says add another item and then another set of fields shows up. I am either going to create all of these fields in a business catalyst form and then figure out how to hide these fileds with css and or javascript, or I need to build this form outside of business catalyst and figure out how to connect the form to the platform so I can still have it go through a workflow. Can anyone offer any suggestions or advice on how to do wither of these items?

Thanks

[Brad Lawryk]

I am trying to think of why you would do it that why? Why not just have them click on an add to cart button instead of filling in fields?

Regardless your best way (other than just click an add to cart button) in my opinion is to do it all in BC using some CSS and/or Javascript.

[RoosterInk]

Brad,

Unfortunately this site is not an ecommerce site. We are building a section where our dealers can order items off of PDF documents that we send them, so this is basically like the old order forms you use to get in printed catalogs. They just need to login and fill out the form. The downside is that we have hundreds of products in the PDFs so in theory if someone wanted 30 products the form would need to accommodate that, and instead of adding all of those fields and trying to anticipate how many fields someone might want I thought it would be easier to have some sort of way for them to add a line for a product themselves. If you have any ideas how we might do this that would be great.

Thanks

Mike

[RichKeller_com]

build a form in bc with all the necessary fields, then look the form action it uses, customize your form or buld a new one, matching the form action and field id' names etc.

[mario_gudelj]

Hi Mike,

Rich has an idea. To get you started I've built something similar for booking multiple seats, but your form will not take bookings and instead it will be a standard form with some credit card fields. See this example http://demo.businesscatalyst.com/booking-multiple-seats

You will have to have a set number of fields. You can not add fields on the front end dynamically. Also, my example is quite primitive. You have to specify the number of products before you start adding them. You cna change this by adding something like "Add Another" field to the form whcih will reveal the next set of hidden fields and so on.

Before you start building anything note that you will have to use a seamless gateway. Can't use something like PayPal standard.

I hope that helps!

Mario

[Simon Darby - NZ]

Mario, thanks for sharing that.

Having dynamic fields created in a form by users would be great in BC. I am working on a project that has an event venue form where users can plan a conference. Each day of a conference has fields for date, number of attendees, and times. Trouble is we never know how many days might be needed for an event. So allowing the user to add more days (sets of fields) is ideal from the user perspective. How to achieve it in BC remains a mystery. Interested to know if anyone has explored this at BC.