Help needed sending variables to email / Google Docs form

Hi Lucia - 

The email method (1) should work but won't work consistently depending on how users have their email client configured. Those, like me, that don't have an email client configured will end up going nowhere with a mailto address.

For method 2, I see what you were trying to do but there's an odd mix of stuff there and ActiveX will only work in IE. For something more cross browser, you'll want something like this. The value in refEmail below can be found by inspecting your form and grabbing the form value. The form uses this to process the pair.

var player=GetPlayer();

var vEmail=player.GetVar("varEmail");

var refEmail="entry.608208641";

var fTarget="https://docs.google.com/a/forms/d/yourformREFERENCE/formResponse";

var postString=fTarget+"?"+refEmail+"="+vEmail+";

var xmlhttp;

if (window.XMLHttpRequest)

{

  xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();

  }

else

{

  xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

  }

xmlhttp.open("GET",postString,true);

xmlhttp.send();

Thanks Steve - but I still cannot get it right.

The google form has two inputs. Name and Email address.

I am publishing to Dropbox and testing from there.

Here is my button script (from you). It is on the "docs 2" button on slide 2. Where do I add the user name (txtName) into the string?:

var player=GetPlayer();

var vEmail=player.GetVar("txtEmail");
var vName=player.GetVar("txtName");


var refEmail="entry.608208641";

var fTarget="https://docs.google.com/a/forms/d/1-GKv8TKZaMYyQE7qEqp4GK2NIrD_-bwFRIHeg8vyOVc/formResponse";

var postString=fTarget+"?"+refEmail+"="+vEmail+";

var xmlhttp;

if (window.XMLHttpRequest)

{

  xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();

  }

else

{

  xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

  }

xmlhttp.open("GET",postString,true);
xmlhttp.send();

Hi Lucia, 

You'll want to open your form and find the ID's for the two fields you're submitting to. Do you have a link to the form? I can probably throw together a working example if you send me your form address (either here or in a PM).

Thanks  Steve - I sent you a PM

My script above didn't work very well in some cases. This worked a bit better:

In a trigger at the slide level, when the timeline starts. This loads JQuery into the head of the document:

function add_script(scriptURL,oID) {

     var scriptEl = document.createElement("script");

     var head=document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];

      scriptEl.type = "text/javascript";      

      scriptEl.src = scriptURL;      

      scriptEl.id=oID;      

      head.appendChild(scriptEl);}

//only want to add these once!

if(document.getElementById('jquery')==null){

add_script("https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.1/jquery.min.js","jquery");

}

In another trigger, this one probably in a button. You'll want to make sure there's enough time for Jquery to load. You might want to setup a loop and check to see if it has loaded before executing. The values in the data set below, such as entry.907772381, are taken from your form field ID's. 

var player=GetPlayer();

var vName=player.GetVar("txtName");

var vEmail=player.GetVar("txtEmail");

var fTarget="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/yourFormKey/formResponse";

function submit_form(){$.ajax({          

url: fTarget,          

type: "POST",          

data: {"entry.907772381" :vName,"entry.602177463":vEmail},          

success: function(data)           {              

//won't return since it's cross domain          

}        

});  

 return false;

}

setTimeout(submit_form(), 2000);

I love this conversation and I have a client who wants to do exactly this! She wants to use a text entry and when the learner clicks submit, the text entry answer goes to an email OR a Google document (I realize this is two separate things). As I was looking through this thread, I couldn't get it to work. First, I couldn't get the trigger to perform "on submit go to email." I think it's because I don't use an email application and my browser wanted to open an email application. Right? My questions:

Does a send email trigger submit a text entry or just a notification that the user clicked submit?

Is there a way to have the whole text entry from the learner be submitted to an email? To a Google doc?

Does someone have step-by-step instructions how to do this - as I couldn't get the above to work for me? Do I have to go into the publish file and copy/paste code? Or set up a variable (btw, I don't use variables often which is why I'm wondering if someone has step-by-step instructions!).

Thank you!

Hi Renee,

The email trigger is a tricky one, and as you mentioned you'll need to have an email client installed.  The email trigger generally just generates an email message but it's up to the user to fill it in, unless you've implemented some additional Javascript as mentioned here - this is not something that I can offer support for, so I'll defer to the community. 

Thank you Ashley. This is what I thought. Community...I'd be forever in debt to you if you could help me with some getting my text entry answers to submit to an email or a Google doc. Has anyone done this? If yes, could you walk me through it? Thank you so much!

@Steve,

    I was excited to try this solution out in order to send data directly to a google sheet.  After setting everything up in AS2 and Google Drive and making sure I had no syntax errors, I ran the code and received a 405 error (method) denied.  It may be that Google disallows this type of action where they previously allowed it.  The error I got was:

a 405 error is listed in the w3c as

The method specified in the Request-Line is not allowed for the resource identified by the Request-URI. The response MUST include an Allow header containing a list of valid methods for the requested resource.

Any ideas of how to get around this limitation?

Thanks Steve

Code worked well, just IE11 not firing, but everything else works (also on tablets). 

Well hello, stranger ;)  Any chance you ever received an answer or figured this out?  I'd love to possible pick your brain on the topic sometime if you have.  Feel free to shoot me an email if you'd like!

Hey there Kali! No! We had to do a crazy work around on this one. But as you can...that wasyears ago. So...maybe there's a different way to manage this. Let's schedule something and we can chat about this (and other things that I'm sure of great discussion on this topic!) :-)