Sophisticated users of the NeatClubs registration service may want to create their own registration forms or use existing forms developed in Microsoft Word or another word processing tool.
Organizations can associate a Custom Registration Form Template with a registration event in such a way that the template registration form will be pre-populated with the fields entered by a registrant. This means that you can generate a printable registration form from NeatClubs in your own preferred format.
The steps involved in creating and using Custom Registration Form Templates are outlined below. This can be a little tricky so you may want to ask for assistance with this.
1. Creating a Templates System Document Category
Custom Registration Form Templates are assumed to be in a System Document Category called "Templates". If you do not have this System Document Category defined, you will need to first create the category by selecting "System Setup", "Categories & Definitions", "Document Categories".
Ensure a Templates category exists as shown below, and press Save Settings. It doesn't matter what order the System Document Category names appear in.
2. Create your Template Registration Form
You will likely want to use a tool like Microsoft Word to create your registration form. An example is shown below. Names entered in square brackets represent the field names according to your NeatClubs form definition. The field names must match exactly, although upper and lower case differences will not matter. The actual field names may vary depending on your requirements. For compatibility with Clublink from Integrated Sports Solutions we have adopted a convention of using the same field names as Clublink, however depending on your needs field names can be chosen however you'd like.
Note that some fields will come from the event level Form definition whereas other field names may come from the web-site account holder setup. (The web-site account holder field names and labels can be customized by going to "System Setup", "Utility Functions", "Configure Database".
Once you have the registration form completed the way that you want it, from Word you should Save this as a "Web Page" in a location you will remember. Saving the document as a web-page will make it a richly formatted HTML document.
To allow the merging of fields into the form, you must save the template as an HTML or RTF format since these formats are easily readable, and are well suited to substituting field values. Saving templates in other formats like Microsoft Word or PDF will not work because this will result in the file being encoded in ways that make them unreadable by NeatClubs. Microsoft's "Single File Web Page" format is similarly problematic. Advanced users are welcome to use RTF, however you may need to hand-edit the generated RTF file using a tool like NotePad to ensure that the substitution codes are all valid of the form [field1], [field2] etc after the Word template is saved in RTF format. Our experience has been that MS-Word will sometimes replace the square-bracket symbols with its own encoding, and if this happens fields affected in this way cannot be substituted.
3. Upload your Template Registration Form to NeatClubs
Use the "Upload a File" feature under the "Document Library" and be sure that your uploaded file is associated with the System Document Category "Templates" that you defined in step one. The User Category can be whatever you'd like. Having a User Category called "Templates" is also a good idea to ensure that your templates do not get confused with other types of documents on the web-site.
4. Configure your Event Definition to make use of the Template
Custom Registration Form Templates can be used for any event type in NeatClubs. When editing any event definition, you can change the "Registration Behaviour" properties below.
Click on "Advanced Registration Options" to expose the various registration related setup options for the event. The document you uploaded in step 3 should appear on the list of valid "Registration Form Templates" as shown below as long as you properly uploaded the document into the "Templates" system category. (In the example below we made the user-defined category "Registration Form Templates" which is why that value appears on the pick list prior to the actual name of our template).
Once you save the change to the setup, this registration template will be associated with this event.
You can use the "Edit Multiple Events at once" feature under "Calendar & Events" to associate a Registration Form Template with multiple events to save time. If you take this approach, you'll need to know the document ID of the Template Registration Form.
You may have as many different registrations templates as you want, and different registration form templates can be applied to different types of events.
5. Viewing and Printing Received Registrations using your Template
When viewing your received registrations, a Microsoft Word icon will appear beside any incoming registration that has a registration template associated with it as shown below.
Clicking on the Word icon depending on your browser should result in a window similar to the one below appearing. The example below is the dialog as it appears with Microsoft Internet Explorer. (don't let the FireFox icon fool you!) - The reason that the Type of document is set to a FireFox document is that we have our associations in Windows setup so that a file ending in .HTM or .HTML is interpret by the Internet Explorer browser to be readable only in FireFox.
Using Internet Explorer will work fine, but we recommend using FireFox when administering NeatClubs for a few reasons. One of these reasons is that if offers more flexibility in terms of how documents are presented. Using FireFox, when we click on the Word icon to display our registration form based on the template, we can choose the tool that we want to use to view the registration.
Besides the default behaviour of showing the HTML based registration form in a browser, FireFox will allow us to associate other applications such as MS-Word with the displayed content. Note that on the server, a registration file has been generated based on our Registration ID #. (760 in this example). This registration will exist on the server only long enough to be viewed and will be removed automatically.
You can use the "Open With" functionality in FireFox to open the merged registration form based on the template using any program able to understand HTML. (this includes Microsoft Word of course as well as several other word processing packages)
You can also configure your browser or your operating system to associate particular applications with particular file types so that the correct program will be selected automatically to view the generated registration form.
When the registration is opened, notice that the actual registration data is populated into our template as below. Because we are in Microsoft Word we can easily save, print or e-mail this formatted registration record depending on our needs.
5. Field Merge Codes and Other Consideration
For completeness and simplicity we have made a decision to make all of the field stored in our database schema for both registration records and events accessible in these custom forms.
The merged codes always need to be present in square brackets. There can be no spaces between the brackets and the field name. The field name itself is not case sensitive.
The contents of the field substitutions come from three places in order of precedence.
1) The field names in the registration form itself.
2) field names in the Member Database setup
3) field names that exist in the actual registration record (the actual registration record field names are quite detailed but are documented here.
As an example, placing field values like [det_amount_due] and [det_amount_paid] would result in these symbols being replaced with the amount due and the amount paid respectively.
We have not yet fully document all the event related variables, but we expect to expose these also in time. In the interim, some commonly used variables are:
[club_logo] - Insert a logo based on the logo specied in the NeatClubs e-mail setup.
[ev_name] - the name of the class or program
[ev_type] - the type of registration event
[ev_date] - the date of the event if applicable
[ev_eventtext] - the descriptive text for the event
[ev_starttime] - the start time if applicable
[ev_endtime] - the end time if applicable
[[ev_name]] - Usually used for class registrations to pull out the class day and time (e.g. Monday, 9:15) This is derived from [ev_sessions_name] in the database. Normally the event definition contains a comma delimited list of session names, but the double brackets instruct the the right session be selected for display based on the value of "det_stream" in the detailed registration record.
[[ev_start_date]] - This is a similarly derived value based on the contents of ev_staggered_start_dates in the database schema. Classes can have multiple start dates depending on the stream so this construct will pull out the appropriate start date based on the class timeslot being registered for. If the first date of the class is an exclude date, the value for the start date will be adjusted automatically to reflect the first "non excluded" day of classes.
[[ev_start_time]] - This is a similarly derived value based on the contents of ev_staggered_start_times in the database schema. Classes can have multiple start times depending on the stream, so this construct will pull out the appropriate start timebase based on the class timeslot being registered for.
[[ev_dow]] - This is the day of week of the program. For convenience, It is extrapolated based on the per-stream start date stored in ev_staggered_start_dates for the stream and the stream that has been registered for.
[det_regdate] - the date and time of the registration
[det_payment] - the amount of payment made (this will be re-written automatically to be of the form $9,999.00)
[det_amount_due] - the amount due (this will be re-written automatically to be of the form $9,999.00)
[det_start_date] - the start date of the program (also stored in ev_date). This may be different in the case of late starts for a class where the start date for participation may be different than the regular start date for the program
[program_year] - the year in which the program takes place
[season] - the season or session in which the program takes place
[reserve_date] - applies for resource reservations only. Holds the date the reservation was made for
[det_brk_baseline_cost] - the net cost before fees and uplifts (this will be re-written automatically to be of the form $9,999.00)
[det_brk_cost_impacts] - the net adjustments owing to form level price impact fields (this will be re-written automatically to be of the form $9,999.00)
[det_brk_tax1] - amount of the first tax if applicable (of the form $9,999.99)
[det_brk_tax2] - amount of the second tax if applicable (of the form $9,999.99)
[det_brk_supp1] - amount of the first supplementary fee if applicable (of the form $9,999.99)
[det_brk_supp2] - amount of the second supplementary fee if applicable (of the form $9,999.99)
[det_brk_supp3] - amount of the third supplementary fee if applicable (of the form $9,999.99)
[det_brk_admin_fee] - amount of the administrative fee if applicable (of the form $9,999.99)
[det_payment_method] - Text description of the payment method
[det_payment_notes] - Text payment notes associated with the registration record
Note that if a field name in the custom form setup conflicts with a name in the underlying database schema, the form level name chosen by the site administrator will take precedence.