Form Tools: generic form processing, storage and access script
Common Problems
No emails are being sent Top 

This may be caused by a number of different things.

  1. First, you need to confirm that your SMTP server has been properly configured to send emails. To test this, unzip and upload this file to your Form Tools root directory (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/formtools/) and open it in your browser. In the form, enter your email address. This will send you a test email (be sure to check your junk mail folder). If you do not receive it, the server is not configured to send emails (note: this may take time, see #2 below). You should send the URL of the email test file to your hosting provider and ask them to activate the feature.
  2. Some servers are configured to send out emails only at certain times (say every hour). You may want to consider waiting for a couple of hours, or better yet contact your hosting provider to ask them how it works.
  3. If you successfully receive a test email from #1 above and are running 1.2.0 or later, there may be a problem with your email template(s). Log into Form Tools, edit your form and click on the Emails tab. Here, using the Test Email section at the bottom of the page, try sending yourself an email one at a time - testing the text and HTML templates individually. If you have customized the templates, you may want to try backing it up then using one of the default templates to see if that works.

Installation: blank page on step 2 Top 

Sometimes, when you upload files via FTP, text files (or HTML & PHP files) show up with double blank lines. It's something to do with newlines being interpreted differently on different systems - \n, \r\n, \r.

Open up your global/library.php file and - if there is any - delete any whitespace after the closing PHP tag ?>. Any whitespace there will prevent the page from appearing.

Uploading a client logo doesn't work Top 

This problem is usually due to one of the following causes:

  1. Your /images/logos/ folder doesn't have write permissions. In order to upload a file to that folder, PHP needs to be allowed to do so - and this means you have to set the folder permissions to 777 on Unix or read-writeable on Windows.
  2. Your $root_dir setting value in your /global/library.php file is incorrect. To confirm it is correct, unzip and upload this file to your Form Tools root directory (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/formtools/) and open it in your browser. This page will let you see what it is currently set to, and our best guess of what it should be set to. Note: this will not work for EVERY case; some servers have oddly arranged aliased folders that prevent this from working. If you're still having problems, please post in the forums.

The "one submission per page" option on the print-preview page doesn't print one per page Top 

This feature was added in version 1.2.0 and requires you to make a small modification to the client CSS. Specifically, you'll need to add a .page_break CSS rule which tells printers to skip to a new page after each submission. To fix this, just edit your client account and insert the new rule. You can find the default CSS listing here. If you haven't made any changes to the default client account CSS, it is recommended that you simply copy and paste the entire CSS from that page into your client account. That will ensure it's up to date.

Also, you may want to do the same thing and copy the CSS into the "Default client CSS" setting in the Program Settings page. This will ensure all future account will contain the same fix.

Only one of my checkbox values is showing up Top 

In order for PHP to understand that it may be receiving multiple values through fields with the same name (e.g. a series of checkboxes), you'll need to change add a "[]" to the end of the name. This is PHP syntax for an "array" (i.e. a list).

So, if your checkboxes look like this:

<input type="checkbox" name="myColor" value="red" /> Red
<input type="checkbox" name="myColor" value="blue" /> Blue
<input type="checkbox" name="myColor" value="green" /> Green

You will need to change them to:

<input type="checkbox" name="myColor[]" value="red" /> Red
<input type="checkbox" name="myColor[]" value="blue" /> Blue
<input type="checkbox" name="myColor[]" value="green" /> Green

You do not need to make any modifications to the name of the form field in Form Tools (i.e. "myColor" would be correct: not "myColor[]").

Form submissions are getting truncated Top 

This problem is usually caused by the field having too small a space allocated in the database. To fix it, log into Form Tools, edit the form and click on the Advanced tab. Here, increase the size of the field.