Creating an "Update Form"

We have a custom form our logged in users can fill out and submit. We need to allow those users to come back later and make changes to the submitted data. But we cannot give these users access to backend pages. I'm not sure how to accomplish this with the Sitefinity forms.

I could possibly pre-populate the form based on the user when they return to the form page. However how do I then post the form data as an update rather than another entry.

Surely there is something I'm missing. It is such a common practice for users to be able to update data previously submitted in a form. Am I just missing it or is this yet another one of those extraordinarily common web practices that Sitefinity just can't do out of the box.

I tend to think of the forms module as a one-way input of form data such as surveys or contact, not really intended to be edited. This is not to say it can't or shouldn't be done, but rather that it makes sense to me personally that such functionality is not available out of the box.

However, it certainly can be done, but does require that you create a custom user control form (ascx) with input controls, and use the Sitefinity Forms API to populate it with existing content and again to post those changes back to the form.

It certainly involves some doing, and I would suggest that Telerik consider creating a PITS item to see if other customers might find such a feature valuable enough to implement. But in the meantime this should allow you to accomplish what you're attempting.

I hope this is helpful

This type of functionality is very common in web applications. User's make typing errors or their information changes and needs to be updated. Are you saying you never have need to allow users to update their data?

 What you really saying SelAromDotNet is that Sitefinity is designed for building a basic web site. But is not robust enough to handle the normal requirements of a web application. This is very disappointing. There are numerous free CMS's that I could use for a basic web site. We were led to use Sitefinity by a local company that told us Sitefinity could do the things we were wanting to do with it. After becoming invested in Sitefinity (financially and otherwise) we are now finding that we have to customize almost every aspect in order to make it do things we thought it could do out of the box.

I don't believe I was saying that Sitefinity is limited to basic websites. if that is the message you took away I apologize. I simply meant that the specific goals you seek are not suited for the Forms module specifically.

The Module Builder is a much better solution. It allows you to create custom data and automatically generates the input and edit forms to manage that data by your backend users.

I misunderstood your requirement and thought you wanted to be able to edit form submissions by your front end users, but it appears what you want is to be able to manage data by your users and that is definitely the domain of the module builder.

However, you are correct that this module builder is designed to be managed from the backend. You can use permissions to restrict users to that area only, but they would need to login to the backend to manage content. this is by design.

If you want to expose the data on the front end, indeed in that case you would need to develop a custom solution, as again, the module builder functions as a backend interface. The API makes this rather simple, but it is a developer task as it is not an out-of-the-box feature as far as I know.

I hope that this is helpful, and I apologize if I misled you as a result of my misunderstanding of your request.

SelAromDotNet, You did not misunderstand.  I do need to allow my front end users to be able to update the data they have submitted in forms. I don't know anything about the Module Builder perhaps that is something that would be useful. But again that is for building custom functionality into Sitefinity.

From my perspective, a web application is all about users being able to store and maintain data and then processing that data into meaningful information that can be displayed back to the user for a useful purpose. Whereas a web site is for disseminating information to users and collecting limited data from those users for our own internal purposes.

Given those definitions. Sitefinity is not designed for web applications if all it can do is collect limited data from those users out of the box. I would expect a robust CMS to allow basic CRUD functionality out of the box.

I don't know if you work for Sitefinity or if you're just a Sitefinity Evangalist. And if it works for you that's wonderful. There is a lot of things that I really like about Sitefinity. However, I am a "web applications developer" and we want to be able to use Sitefinity to build Advanced web applications for our clients. This is just one example of numerous times we've asked about specific functionality that we felt should be obvious, only to be told that it doesn't do that out of the box.

I post this information because when we researched which CMS we should use we were unable to find anything talking about the limitations of Sitefinity ( or most other cms's). We might have gone a different route had we found this information in the Sitefinity forums from those that have actually used it.