Patricio Treviño · 05 March, 2019 · 4 min read

Supercharging the Success Message in WFFM forms

How many of you have opted for a redirection to a thank you page over a simple successful message with no refresh when dealing with Web Forms for Marketers? If you are doing this willingly, then fine, but if you are doing it because there are no styling options in the Success Message field, then keep reading... there are a few tricks you can use to supercharge this field.

The basics

Ok, let's get this out of the way so we can focus on what really matters...

Even though the field is a Multi-Line Text, you can still use html tags inside it. All html tags work! Even the css and script tags can be used (although these are not recommended). The html will be honored and even the styles defined in the layout will be applied as expected.

This alone should be enough to create a more or less decent thank you page, but because we are are using Sitecore we are going to take this a step further...

The problem: dynamic links

One neat Sitecore feature (and one of my personal favorites), is the ability to create dynamic links to other (internal) items via ids. This may not look like much, but believe me content authors love it because it gives them the flexibility to move things around without breaking previously established links.

Rich Text fields support dynamic links out-of-the-box as the field use them extensively, unfortunately for us, the Form template doesn't use Rich Text fields (no idea why), but Multi-Line Text. Of course there is nothing stopping you from using dynamic links inside the field, the links will still render and work just fine, but they will look ugly and this can be confusing for both users and SEO bots.

But, Sitecore doesn't close a door without opening a window...

The solution: pipelines

Web Forms for Marketers defines a successAction pipeline that gets triggered every time a form is successfully submitted. Attached to this pipeline is the FormatSuccessMessage processor whose purpose is formatting the SuccessMessage (duh!). Unfortunately, the default implementation of this processor is pretty basic (at least in older versions of WFFM), but at least it gives us a good extension point. So we can replace the default implementation with our own using the below patch config file.

      
        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
      
        <configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
      
          <sitecore>
      
            <pipelines>
      
              <successAction>
      
                <processor type="Sitecore.Form.Core.Pipelines.FormSubmit.FormatSuccessMessage, Sitecore.Forms.Core">
      
                  <patch:delete />
      
                </processor>
      
                <processor type="MyAssembly.Namespace.Pipelines.FormatSuccessMessage, MyAssembly.Namespace" />
      
              </successAction>
      
            </pipelines>
      
          </sitecore>
      
        </configuration>

view raw z-replace-format-success-message.config hosted with ❤ by GitHub

As we said before, html in the SuccessMessage is already handled, so no need to do any sort of html/css/script processing (phew!), so our only concern at this point is the dynamic urls... easy fix if you have the right tool...

Enter the LinkManager a.k.a. the heart of Sitecore's link management module. A simple call to ExpandDynamicLinks will do the trick.

      
        /// <summary>
      
        /// Formats the success messages.
      
        /// </summary>
      
        public class FormatSuccessMessage
      
        {
      
            /// <inheritdoc />
      
            public void Process(SubmitSuccessArgs args)
      
            {
      
                Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, nameof(args));
      
                if (args.Form == null) return;
      
                args.Result = LinkManager.ExpandDynamicLinks(args.Form.SuccessMessage);
      
            }
      
        }

view raw FormatSuccessMessage.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And the end result? Beautiful, user and SEO friendly urls. Nice!

Happy Coding!

	/// <summary>
	/// Formats the success messages.
	/// </summary>
	public class FormatSuccessMessage
	{
	/// <inheritdoc />
	public void Process(SubmitSuccessArgs args)
	{
	Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, nameof(args));

	if (args.Form == null) return;
	args.Result = LinkManager.ExpandDynamicLinks(args.Form.SuccessMessage);
	}
	}