The real benefit to Chronoforms is it is FREE.

I start with installing both ChronoForms and CronoConnectivity from Chronoengine. Go into Chronoforms and create a form. I started one here for customers. I wanted to keep their name, website, and password list. I started with a form called Customers.

After the designer elements of the form were finished  I did not go into set up yet. I went back to the “Forms Manager”, checked the “Customer” form and hit “Create table”. I ended up using the standard setting.

Now I go back into the form and add a couple of pieces to the “Setup” tab. In the “on load” section add “HTML (Render Form)” and “on submit” area add a “DB Save” from the Data Management elements.

You will now be saving the data to the database.

In ChronoConnectivity click “New” credential Manager. I am calling mine “customeredit”.  The Connection Name I called “customeredit”, and set published to “yes”.

Next click on “Models” and enter a new Model. I titled mine “customered” for customer edit. Use the dropdown to select the table where you stored the data from the form.

On the “Front List” tab Click on “Settings”. Select the display type as “Table”. The “Columns list” is the how the data is displayed when it is returned. The breakdown of the columns list is this:

customered.domain.DOMAIN = the model name . the database column name . the heading of the column ( you can make these up.)

The “Sortables” allows this column to be sortable once it is displayed.

On the “Actions” tab click “edit”. The form event will be the name of the form and the action. I called mine “CustomerEdit” and the action is “:load”. I don’t have this form created yet so we will do that next.

Before we leave this connection we need to set it permissions and that is to make the “view” allowed for the public so we can see it.

Go back to Chronoforms, check “Customer” our original form and hit the “Copy” button. Rename this copy “CustomerEdit”. This is what the the “Form event” is looking for.

Go into the form “CustomerEdit” and click on “Designer”

Click on the “Edit” button and set the “Field Name” and the “Field ID” for this “First Name” element to be “customered[firstname]”. This will tie the data coming over to this form together, so the firstname parameter will fill in the “firstname” field. Do the same with the rest of the elements. I also put a hidden field to collect the ID number.

Next go to the “Setup” tab. Add a “HTML (Render Form) element in the “On load” section. From the “External Apps” menu drag a “Connection Action”

Lastly add the name of the connection from ChronoConnectivity. I used the name “customeredit”. The Connection action is “save”.

You can create a menu item for the Form and the Connectivity View to see it all in action .

I will upload a zip file with the forms, connection, and database extract so you can use what I have working. It is easy to take my form and “Restore” it to your Chronoform and do the same thing with the Chrono Connection. The database table is easy to import a single table, and in my zip I have just the one table.

chronos_example_full

I am working on a Chronoform / Connectivitiy version 6 tutorial. Version 5 wasn’t easy to understand and version 6 is looking to be just as complicated. Version 6 does handle the database input better.

I hope this helps someone else out there…