Implementing a status dependent submission-to-entry workflow

[michaelhue]

I'm using Formie in a few projects, primarily as a way for site users to submit entries without access to the control panel. This is achieved with the Element integration and mostly works, but the backend experience could be improved.

My ideal workflow would look like this:

1. User submits a form in the frontend.
2. The submission gets a default status New, but no entry is created (yet).
3. Content editors get notified and check the new submission in the control panel.
4. If the submission is fine, the editor sets the status to Accepted and saves the form.
5. Now the submission will be saved as an entry and all future changes to the submission will trigger an update of that entry.
6. If there is a problem with the submission, the editor will set the status to Rejected. No entry will be created.

So my main problem with the current state of the plugin is the Element integration triggering on the initial form submission (before it can be checked).

I would love a setting that triggers the integration every time a submission is saved, but only if it has a specific status.

Does anyone have an idea how to achieve this? My intuition would be to build a custom integration on top of the Element integration and change the conditions that trigger it, but I'm not sure if that is possible at all.

Thanks!

[michaelhue]

I had some success implementing this with event listeners.

First we want to ensure that the element integration with the handle entry will not run if the submission does not have the accepted status. The SendIntegrationPayloadEvent seems to be a good place for this condition:

Event::on(
    Entry::class,
    Entry::EVENT_BEFORE_SEND_PAYLOAD,
    function (SendIntegrationPayloadEvent $event): void {
        // Do nothing if this is not the target integration.
        if ($event->integration->getHandle() !== 'entry') {
            return;
        }

        // Always prevent the integration from running if the submission
        // does not have the correct status.
        if ($event->submission->getStatus() !== 'accepted') {
            $event->isValid = false;
        }
    }
);

With this condition in place, we can now manually trigger the entry integration every time a submission is saved:

Event::on(
    Submission::class,
    Submission::EVENT_AFTER_SAVE,
    function (ModelEvent $event): void {
        /** @var Submission */
        $submission = $event->sender;

        // Ignore incomplete/spam submissions.
        if ($submission->isIncomplete || $submission->isSpam) {
            return;
        }

        $integrations = Formie::$plugin->getIntegrations()
            ->getAllEnabledIntegrationsForForm($submission->getForm());

        // Find the target integration.
        $integration = ArrayHelper::firstWhere(
            $integrations,
            fn(Integration $i) => $i->getHandle() === 'entry'
        );

        // Do nothing if the target integration is disabled/missing.
        if (!$integration) {
            return;
        }

        Formie::$plugin->getSubmissions()
            ->sendIntegrationPayload($integration, $submission);
    }
);  

Note that the Update Entries setting of the Element integration needs to be enabled, otherwise saving the the submission repeatedly may create more than one entry.

There is currently a bug that prevents this setting from working correctly though:

• Element integration fails when Update Entries is enabled #2251

[engram-design]

I would love a setting that triggers the integration every time a submission is saved, but only if it has a specific status.

It's come up before and a similar one for spam but we just need this fine-tuned to prevent triggering integrations unintentionally.

The submission gets a default status New, but no entry is created (yet).

This is a nice idea, to have integrations opt-in through status. I believe we have conditional logic pencilled in as a feature for integrations.

Don't forget that in your above event, you'll want to check if the submission is complete, as saving a submission is done for every page submit for multi-page forms. Otherwise, your event handling is pretty sound.

[michaelhue]

Hey Josh, thanks for the reply!

Looking forward to those improvements you mentioned. I think they would be nice additions to enable more complex workflows, especially since the fundamentals are already in place.

I haven't used multi-page forms yet, so the feedback is appreciated. I added isIncomplete and isSpam checks to my event handler. Compliments for providing so many cancelable events, really opens the door for easy customization.

---

One more suggestion for an improvement to the Element integration: the integration could track all elements a submission generated. This would make the Update entries setting more convenient, since it removes the need for manually creating and mapping a submissionId field.

This would also allow displaying the relationship between those elemtents in the control panel, which is quite useful for content editors. Similar to how the Related Elements plugin does it:

For now I will hook into the submission and entry templates and create a custom widget that shows the relationship, if it exists.

[engram-design]

Appreciate the suggestion there. I'm not sure quite how that'll technically be done, but I'll consider it!

[michaelhue]

That would probably require a new database table with these columns:

• submissionId
• elementId
• integrationId

With that relationship in place, you could use the Element::EVENT_DEFINE_SIDEBAR_HTML event to render a template in an element's sidebar. Here is the relevant code from the Related Elements plugin: https://github.com/MindseekerMedia/craft-related-elements/blob/main/src/RelatedElements.php#L49-L58