Make fmbadhandler repopulate name and email fields | Simple How-to

[russellr]

Hi,

I am however left a little puzzled by this issue. I understand that 'realname' and 'email' are treated as 'special values' by the PHP scripts (although I am uncertain why this is so); but not why they get 'lost' when the user is returned to the form. Rather than requiring the proposed work-around, which I did try but threw up one or two quirks, is there no scope for modifying the PHP of fmbadhandler to pass them back in a similar fashion to other values?

You are right to be puzzled.

There is a logic to this, but it's incomplete logic.

"realname" and "email" should be re-filled on return from error, despite the fact that they are special fields.

In other words, they are "special special fields".

It's on the TO DO list, and has been for years. But, because there's a perfectly good workaround, it keeps getting put off.

It probably takes 2 life times and 100 million lines of code to become the perfect software designer.

I'm making fewer bad implementation decisions than I did 30 years and 20 million lines of code ago....in another 20 years, maybe there'll only be a couple per year.

[NorthPole]

Russell,

Thanks for the quick response. It's not really a big deal; and arguably there's some security benefit in making a genuine person re-enter their name and e-mail address again, which is quick to do anyway. What really bugs me with some forms is when a failed submission loses the entire content of a long message I've just carefully composed, and thankfully FormMail doesn't do that! However, if you do ever get round to sorting this quirk out, I'm sure we would all appreciate it.

[faypj]

Thanks Jeremy for very helpful post.

One minor but important correction
<input type="hidden" name="mail_options" value="exclude=email;realname" />

should be:

<input type="hidden" name="mail_options" value="Exclude=email;realname" />

with capitalised Exclude

Now works pefectly.

Grateful thanks to Russell

Peter

[tomdkat]

When I hit my retun_link there is nothing repopulated in the fields

Make sure you specify the "type" attribute on the <input> tags.

I just encountered this problem and found this the hard way.

Coding this:

<input size="50" name="Name">

results in the field NOT being filled in.

Coding this:

<input size="50" name="Name" type="text">

works.

Peace...