Hi, I've had an issue saving the form in Drag and Drop mode as the fields can unexpected fall back to default settings after saving the form and open it again. So I decided to work in expert mode thinking the form text editor be more reliable and stable. Well, today something strange is happening.
While in expert mode, I save the form, and when it reloads, the text editor shows HTML content from another page (home page to be specific.) I also notice that the form slug shows 'home' even though I have given it a unique name and also tried update it to replace the word "home." Actually, all User Forms I create now shows "home" as the slug name - very strange. And if I save the form again with that strange HTML showing in the text editor, my front end template form will show that HTML content.
It sounds like one of your other plugins (or possibly theme) are conflicting with Forms.
Could you please disable all non-Toolset plugins and switch theme to twentynineteen then try again. If the issue disappears then it should be possible to determine the source of any conflict by a process of elimination.
Let me know how that goes so I can see how to proceed.
Thanks for the reply, Nigel.
I disabled other plugins and switched to a generic theme, the issue persists. Interesting thing is that only the User Forms are affected. I have some Post Forms and these seem to work as expected. Please see screenshots. Could it be database corruption related?
I disabled Toolset plugins and activated them again in conjunction of restoring the DB from a backup copy. One of these actions or both somehow fixed the problem. Even though we still don't know exactly what was causing the issue, the bigger question is how do you make Toolset Forms more stable and reliable especially when it is a tool to build critical functionality for WP sites.
Also another new observance I have. When saving the form even in Expert Mode, the code in the editor somehow reverts to default to initial state - my custom code GONE. I then found that by keeping the editor panel open (instead of collapsed) when saving does the trick of preventing my custom code from being wiped out. This plugin is unpredictable indeed.
If I make some changes to the form in expert mode, then toggle closed the form editor, then save it, when I toggle open the form editor it initially appears blank.
If I load a page that uses the form the changes are apparent.
Any kind of interaction with the form edit screen (clicking, resizing the browser) triggers redrawing the markup, which is all intact.
So I can see a usability issue here where the editor content initially appears blank when expanding, and I can report that. Is that the extent of the problem? Your edited content re-appears if you click into the editor, for example?
Well, I do notice the brief blank screen after saving the form as you have observed. Though, this is a lesser problem for me. What I experience is that once the editor loads the code, it shows the default version and not my customized version. This is troublesome because I had to 'redo' the work a few times. So now I make sure to save a copy of my code somewhere else in case something funky happens.
That is just my observation without extensive testing to ensure the problem can be consistently replicated. And as mentioned, it just feels the plugin is unstable in keeping the custom code intact. So I wonder, when the form is saved, isn't the custom code saved in the database? And why there's a chance at all the code get redrawn differently the next time the editor reloads?
It is certainly the case that the transition to the new drag and drop forms editor did not go smoothly. While we tried to anticipate the various circumstances it would be used in and to plan for a seamless upgrade experience for existing sites there were far too many issues which slipped through testing, so much so that it prompted an internal review about how that happened and how we can ensure it doesn't again.
It took a few iterations of minor releases to iron out the kinks, and the issue of losing customised form content when updating or while using expert mode should have been finally resolved in the last release (2.3.6).
That's the version your are currently using.
So, if you have the impression that the forms editor is unstable, that's valid in terms of the recent experience.
But if you are experiencing problems right now with the current version, then that's something I need to get to the bottom of, which means identifying the specific problems together with how to reproduce them.
So I'm not sure which of these best describes the current situation.
Thanks for the insight of what's happening with the development progress, Negel.
Let me check to make sure I have the latest version and if the problem is taken care of with the latest version.
With the latest version of the plugin, it seems the editor is keeping my custom code intact. Though, without full confidence, I'm still leaving the editor box uncollapsed when saving the form. There's one thing still persists. The form slug still showing "home" and not the unique slug name as you'd expect. Also note that only a couple forms are having slug name issue. Four other forms I created show the slug name correctly. So this is rather strange. Can you think of any scenario when the form slug name doesn't show the correct version? You can't say plugin conflict because this would happen to all forms I created.
It sounds like something corrupted in the database, possibly a value generated in an earlier version of the plugin that had bugs which is messing with the forms even with the current plugin version.
Let's try exporting the forms, and then I'll import into another site to see if I see the same.
Go to Toolset > Export / Import. You should export both the Types settings and the Forms.
Upload those files to somewhere like dropbox and share the links with me. (Links are hidden by default in the forum, no-one else will see them.)
