Form mapping lets you capture data submitted by visitors through forms and silently stores that data inside submitter profiles (anonymous or not), regardless of the initial purpose of the form. Correctly used, in conjunction with personalization, form mapping enables you to employ a strategy of progressive profile nurturing by collecting reliable, meaningful, relevant and reusable data.
To access the Manage Form Mapping page:
A form mapping is defined by a name, path to the page which contains the form, the form identifier (name or ID), and instructions on how to treat each field of the form when the form is submitted.
Form mapping is a process by which a marketer defines that some fields in a form should be captured by jExperience and inserted into the visitor profile. Of course, the visitor is the one who submits the form.
Form mapping has been developed to work with most forms as soon as they are included in a Jahia page, whether this is a HTML static form, a form built with Forms, and even if the form has been developed on a third-party platform. Only two constraints need to be fulfilled for your form to be compatible with the form mapping the:
The creation of the form mapping is a multi-step process that starts by identifying the form that must be mapped, then by declaring the mapping between the form fields and the profile fields. To avoid mistakes, and because each operation is based on previously provided information, each step appears in the page once the previous step is completed.
Step 1: a form appears
Step 2: A new section appears
Once you have clicked on the page name, the overlay presenting the sitemap disappears and the field Base page path is filled with the correct URL.
Step 3: a new field appears
Then a new field appears in the page: form name. This field allows jExperience to define which form to capture in the page, which can contain several (at least two if, like most websites, you have a search form present on all your pages).
To select the correct form:
Step 4
A new section Additional pages appears to allow you to select other pages that include the same form (it needs to have the same Form name or Form ID) so you do not have to create one mapping per form instance.
Step 5
The Mappings section is where you are going to map the form fields to the visitor profile fields.
As soon as you have selected a form, jExperience has analyzed the form to extract each field (even the hidden fields). Those fields are available in the drop-down list labeled Please select a form field.
Note that as soon as a field has been mapped to a profile field, it disappears from the list of available fields. This avoids accidently mapping the same field twice with inconsistent directives and also shows users what fields remain to be mapped.
Note also that you are not obliged to map all fields from the initial form, obviously.
Finally, notice - at the bottom of the screenshot - the name of the city field is taken from the form. In this example this field name is understandable (city id) although it appears to be a little cryptic. This example illustrates how important it is to enforce your developer team or content contributors to choose meaningful names for the form. Form field names like field1, field2, etc. will make it close to impossible for marketers to properly map them to profile properties.
Finally, the form mapping builder allows you to assign visitors, who submit this form, to one or more static lists, which can be very convenient and flexible.
It can happen that a form contains fields that do not correspond to any existing property inside your jExperience visitor profile, but that marketers would still like to capture anyway. Well, it is possible and, in fact, it is easy to achieve as well.
Now that the property has been prepared, as soon as a first-time visitor submits a form with this field filled, the property will be created and the value will be stored in his or her profile. To make the property appear in the profiles page (which is not mandatory in order to reuse it), please refer to the Profiles chapter.