Using a Secured Published Profile to Restrict Access to Submitting a Form

The publishing wizard is used to publish data collected through your forms. This powerful system allows you to easily build secure published pages complete with authentication / username & password access. In most cases, you'll be publishing data from your submission bin to create a directory, or to provide web based access to your data. In this article we're going to look at how to use the publishing system to secure access to a form.

In this example, we have a request form that we only want authorized users to be able to access and submit. We're going to use a secured published profile to secure access to the form. This is accomplished by creating a new Form/Content Bin, that has only two fields; title and FormURL. We'll then submit one entry with the title ('Request Form') and our formURL (the full URL to the form we want to restrict access to). This is the data that we will publish, which will result in a link to access the form on our published page. Lets get started:

Creating the Request Form

The First step is to create the request form that we want to secure access to. In order to keep things simple, we're going to build a simple form with only 3 fields; name, email_address and request. This article assumes you know how to create a basic form. Our form is shown below:


The form http://www.logiforms.com/formdata/user_forms/243_1802639/41058/.


Creating the Dummy Form (The form that we will publish data from)

The next step is to build the form which we will publish. This form will only be used internally and will contain the data that we want to publish. In this case, that data will be the Form Title and the Form URL from the form we created in the previous step.

1. Create a new form named "SecuredFormLinks"
2. Add the following two fields to the form 'formurl' and 'title'. Both field should be plain text fields. Your form should look like the one shown here:
   
   
   
   
3. Next, click the link above the form in the editor to open the form in a new window. Enter the form title and the form url (from the previous step) and click submit.
   
   
   
   You'll see a blank page (because we have not set up an autoresponder for this form), just close the open window. You have now added one record to this submission bin.
   
   
4. To verify the submission was added correctly, click the Data Management, and you should see the submission in the bin:
   
   

Next, we'll create the published profile and publish this data so that when a user logs-in to the published profile, they will see the form title and the link to the form.


Creating the Published Profile

Now we're going to build the published profile. Note, that the final step, after we have built the profile is to add the security. We'll get to that at the end of this article. Lets take a look at how to create this published profile.

1. Click the Create new Component icon at the top of the members area
2. Select the publishing Wizard
3. Enter a name for the published profile and select the 'SecuredFormLinks' form as shown here:
   
   
   
   
4. Click Next. On the layout page, select the 'Vertical Listings, 1 per row' option and click Next
5. This next step is key. We're going to create the layout that will be applied to each record being published. In our case, we're only publishing one record, so whatever we create here will be displayed on the published page. Click the wildcard icon in the editor toolbar, select title and click OK
   
   
   
   
6. This will insert the [title] wildcard into the editor. The next step is to make the title an actual link to our form. Highlight the word [title] inside the editor and click the Anchor toolbar item. A new window will open up. In this window, change the protocal to 'Other' and enter [FormUrl] in the space provided.
   
   
   
   This 'wildcard' will be translated to the full URL to the form when the page is published.
7. Before closing the window, click the target tab, and select 'New Window' and click OK.
   
   
   
   
8. We're going to leave the layout like that for this example. In real use, you would likely expand upon the layout a bit depending on your specific project.
9. Click Next to advance.
10. On the next page, you can enter a name for the page and set some general options. Set the second set of options to match those shown here. Since we are not publishing a directory or multiple records, we want to turn off the next/back buttons:
    
    
    
    Click Next to Advance
11. Click Next on the Page Header & Footer to leave the defaults, or edit them if you prefer.
12. Click Next to skip the Page Filter section
13. Click 'No, do not create a search page
14. Your published page is now complete. Click on the name of your form to load its details in the right side window:
    
    
    
    
15. Click the link 'Click here to preview non-secure page' to open the published page. You should see something like the example below, which shows the default header and the title of the form. Clicking on the link opens the form in a new window (shown here).
    
    
    
    

You have now created a published profile that provided access to your form. The final step is to secure the profile so that it can only be accessed by username & password. Securing a published profile is explained in depth in the article, Creating a Secure Members Area.

When reading the second article, bear in mind that you can pass values into your form though the url to prepopulate the form. Using the logged in users info (explained in "Creating a Secure Members Area"), you can prepopulate the request form with the logged in users information so you can later trace back all submissions to that user.


Keywords: form security,authentication,private access, restricted access, secure, publishing,members only,login,log-in,publishing wizard,staff access,intranet,members-only,password-protected