Custom form question

Hi Andrew,

There are a few approaches you could take to build a form like you describe. The first way would be to set up one form for each category, with different notifications for each. (To receive email notification of CMS form submissions, a user must be a Convio admin and belong to an administrative security group that includes CMS permissions. For more information, see Convio Online Help.) Visitors would first need to visit a page where they would choose a category, which would then direct them to the appropriate form. The categories could be simple anchor links, or you could build a drop-down menu with a bit of JavaScript. If simple anchor links would suffice, this method could be implemented without any custom code.

Another approach would be to build a form using a mailto: action. However, using mailto: is strongly discouraged because it's unreliable, often provides a poor user experience, and exposes the email addresses to spammers. You could pre-process the form using JavaScript and store the addresses in a data structure, but it wouldn't entirely eliminate any of the aforementioned problems and would increase the complexity of implementation.

A third approach would be to use a third-party form hosting solution like http://www.mailmyform.com/. With the mailmyform.com service, you would want the features of the paid version, rather than the advertisement-supported free version.

Finally, you could set up a mail rule to forward notification messages based on a field in the form. You would want the rule to run on the server, like ones you can set up in Microsoft Outlook for an Exchange server, or using procmail on a Unix-based server.

I hope this is helpful.

Regards,

Ben