Happy Sunday All,

I've had some great success creating a multi-step registration form for my client's sports camp website.  The amount paid by each attendee is complex, as it contains a number of variables.  There is different pricing by location of camp, overnight vs. day camp, earlybird vs. regular registration, equipment fee, and promotional discount. 

I want to make this process as user friendly for my client, but also give him some powerful functionality without having to bring me back in the loop to help, if he chooses.  I want him to be able to add camp dates and locations, and setup pricing for each camp on his own.  He wants to manage his own promotional codes for discounts etc. 

All of this is pointing, in my opinion, in the direction of a shopping cart functionality.  Has anyone attempted to integrate Dynamic Forms with the DNN core shopping cart or any other?  Are there free shopping carts that are better than the DNN core cart? 

I foresee the final solution as being partially Dynamic Forms and partially shopping cart.  In such a way, client will collect information needed from each camper, and have the functionality to manage all parameters of the shopping experience.  However, I'm a newbie and need some expert opinions on how you might go about solving above scenario. 

Thanks, in advance, for your help.

Sid

Sid,

Hi. Well we have had some users integrate Dynamic Forms with shopping cart modules (not sure specifically this one or not) but there are options to either redirect them to different pages after they pay (maybe a page for each payment option?) or more integrated solutions to pass along querystring tokens and have the shopping cart module add items to the cart depending on whats passed. We have personally handled some complicated situations where the items passed along the querystring were very specific based on the criteria / form fields. I know in Catalook we could pass multiple items along the querystring to add individual products and so forth to the cart etc...

Depending on your experience level in JavaScript (or the budget) you might also check out demo 20 at http://www.datasprings.com/formdemos. This was recently added and shows how to calculate a price, maybe based on multiple scenarios and from there send the user to PayPal for payment or process their credit card with Authorizenet. Dynamic Forms can handle these implementations directly and you wouldn't even need another shopping cart module, however client side events can get complicated so there are some disadvantages (we offer Premium Support if you need us to code them which you can pick up at http://www.datasprings.com/Premium-Support). Basically you would have the client side events calculate the price based on some if statements (such as if they chose early registration and a specific location the price is this, or if they chose overnight with early bird the price is that etc...). And from there you could also code in potentially different coupon codes etc... You could even make these prices based on hidden fields that the camp admin could later go and modify to change the price without having to mess with the client side events etc....

-Chad

Chad,
Thanks for your insight on this issue. If I were to setup the DNN Core shopping cart, can I configure the process such that the user can start by selecting their camp from the cart, then be taken to the Dynamic Forms I've created? If so, is this done by passing session variables , query string?
Thanks,
Sid

Yes, you can pass field valuse and retrieve field values via session, cookie, and querystring variables (all based on the fields short field name). Would they need to then go 'back' to the cart to pay? If not, I am not sure why you would need to use the cart, you could simply setup a Dynamic Forms instance there they choose their type, (maybe a radio button or something?) and then redirect them to a Dynamic Forms 'payment' instance (you could still pass variables along the querystring or session) and pay within the 2nd Dynamic Forms instance via PayPal etc... Setting up the payment piece isn't that complicated, the only part that can be complicated is the calculations/client side events etc...


-Chad

Chad,

The dilemma I have is: The site owner must be able to setup camps using the same forms, and have the ability to change pricing without having to navigate client side events and javascript.

That's why I was thinking of a combined approach where the user is taken to the shopping cart to choose their camp, then taken to the Dynamic Form to complete the required fields, and, depending on which is sequenced first, either use the shopping cart or DF to handle payment.

If I'm confusing you, or am not grasping concepts correctly, please drop me an email and I will try to elaborate further.

Thanks,
Sid

Hi. Well yes, this is where I was referencing the ability to have hidden fields etc... Basically you could have hidden fields called 'Gold', 'Silver', 'Bronze' etc... From there you can set the default value of those hidden fields to be '30.00', '20.00', '10.00'. You can then reference those hidden fields as the price, or maybe use those hidden field values within the JavaScript / Client Side Events. These can be referenced as the token name such as $(Token) etc... This way, the admin can come to the site and modify the default value (to change from 30.00 to maybe 50.00) without ever having to touch the JavaScript/ Client Side Events etc...

-Chad