Is there a way to prepopulate a 3rd party form with data?

Question

I have an extension where the user can manage sermons for their church. That's done with the regular list and items views.

Now a user asked if it would be possible to add a feature to order physical copies of those sermons.

Before I start coding I wanted to see if there is a way to use existing extensions to do that. With so many form and shop extensions out there, I wondered if there are some, where I can write a plugin or some hooks to prepopulate the form or cart with my items.

The simplest thing would be to have a form where the user could give his address and it sends the titles of the sermons he wants to have.

I could do such a form myself, but usually the site admin wants to customise it and maybe add more or less fields to it. That's why I think it would be nice to use a form (or shop) component to build that form. But fot that the component would need some sort of API, hooks or whatever where I could "prepopulate" it with the selected sermon data.

Does anyone know of something like that?

Answer 1

I have used RSform Pro (http://www.rsjoomla.com/joomla-extensions/joomla-form.html) on many of my Joomla sites and I am very happy with it. I think it would meet all of your requirements. You have the ability to to populate a selectbox or field with values taken from an external table or from any Joomla table.

You can also integrate Paypal very easily, so this gives users the option of selecting their desired sermon, and paying that way. Set up custom emails, attach files, manage lists, access controls for admins etc...

This extension also allows for custom php scripting such as scripts called on form display / on form process / after form process. So you have the option of writing your own functions and embedding these within your form, alternatively there are a number of plugins that come with the pro version - http://www.rsjoomla.com/support/documentation/view-knowledgebase/26-plugins-and-modules.html

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

It's very unclear what you're asking for....populating forms, adding to carts, or downloading with no mention of what kind of cart you're working with. Any of these are considerable work to tie them altogether, so I'd suggest starting at the Paid Downloads Extensions for Joomla and see what's already done, or download one of the few free ones and see if it comes close to what you're asking for.