Form Tools

Welcome!

Welcome to the Form Tools developer documentation. This section was added with Form Tools 1.4.6 to provide a little more information for web developers/programmers keen on modifying the code to suit their own needs. Formerly, the developer documentation was rather scanty, which made leaping into the code rather daunting.

If you are looking for information on how the program operates, the installation instructions, or would like to better understand what functionality the program offers, please see the User Documentation section (see link in header). If you find any errors or inconsistencies in any of the online documentation, please send me a note at the email above.

The developer documentation provides a simple UI for browsing the source code for each Form Tools release, as well as some information about the coding methodology, overall file structure, database structure and other general info.

Overview

Form Tools is written for web developers who work on online registration sites, or sites that require any form of information gathering from their online visitors. Put simply, it is a form processor, storage and data access script written in PHP and MySQL, designed to work with any existing web form. With a few minor changes to your form, you can stop using old-fashioned form-mail scripts and instead store form submissions in a database, instantly providing your clients with options such as mass data export via excel, printer-friendly pages, data sorting, form submission editing and optional email of form submissions.

Okay, sales pitch over, here's the nitty gritty.

Form Tools is a PHP-MySQL driven web application with (currently) two levels of user access: administrator and clients. Client accounts have limited control and are be assigned to particular forms, which are added to Form Tools for storage via the program UI. Each client account styles may be uniquely customized, as well as what options are available to them when logging in (like whether they can edit and delete submissions). The administrator (normally the web developer) can create as many client accounts as they wish through the admin interface. Clients are automatically given restricted access to the program so they cannot change most form settings without being explicitly allowed.

The storage of the form submissions is quite simple. Form Tools uses a test form submission to gather in all the fields that you need to store (it saves you having to type them in manually which can be tedious and error-prone), and based on the configuration settings you enter, it builds a unique MySQL table to store the information (1 table per form). The form naming convention is {form table prefix}form_{form id - integer}. As detailed in the Storing a New Form section in the user documentation, you have some control over the table structure, including field sizes and database field names. All data is stored as strings but with 1.4.6 you may identify a few common data types (string, number, date) for a few advanced controls.

Help out!

If you would like to help work on the source code, I'd love to hear from you. Just drop me a line with the features / bug fixes you'd like to work on.