The Forms APIs (except for Requests) allow for the Creation and Sending of Activities when submissions are made. Because Activities have numerous details (Subject, Body, who to send them to) and HTML Forms are really only good for sending name/value pairs, we need to "bundle" the fields together to create a single activity with a clever naming convention.
Fields
Here are the fields you can use to create and send activities through the Company, Contact, Sale and Ticket Form APIs.
|
Field Name |
Example/Default |
Notes |
|
activity_send_IDENTIFIER |
1 |
This field tells Accelo to try and create an activity using the IDENTIFIER you set. This IDENTIFIER can be any string you like - it just needs to be unique and used consistently for the Activity you want to send. |
|
activity_to_IDENTIFIER |
staff_ID or group_ID |
The activity_to field (with _IDENTIFIER added to connect it with the other details of this activity) needs to have a value that is either staff_ID or group_ID. The ID attribute needs to be an integer (ie, group_1) and map to the User or Group ID (which you can see from the address bar or the respective edit screens in your Accelo account). Note that if you want to send the Activity to multiple staff, you can use more than one activity_to_IDENTIFIER field, one set to have a value of staff_ID1 and the other of staff_ID2, where ID1 and ID2 are the different user IDs respectively. There's no limit on how many of these IDs you include, and you can even mix and match group and staff declarations - we'll make sure to deduplicate so people only get one activity email. |
|
activity_cc_IDENTIFIER |
staff_id or group_id |
As for the activity_to field, but with the recipient staff as CCs |
|
activity_bcc_IDENTIFIER |
staff_id or group_id |
As for the activity_to field, but with the recipient staff as BCCs |
|
activity_subject_IDENTIFIER |
New Sale to follow up on! |
This is the subject of the Activity and will be sent to the staff members (either defined as staff_ID or as part of a group, above). The email will be sent "from" the email address of the contact entering the form, however the Return-Path will be a notification email address. |
|
activity_body_IDENTIFIER |
I'd like a quote for many widgets! |
The body content of the Activity that will be sent to the staff members |
Attachments
if you choose to also Upload Attachments (see how to here) and also Create and Send Activities, the Activities will have all of the Attachments uploaded then attached to the Activities/Emails sent out.
Autoreplies from Staff Users
The emails that are sent from the Forms API are delivered "on behalf" of the client contact, and so their Return-Path address is postmaster@accelo.com. This unmonitored email address is where out-of-the-office and bounce (address no longer in use) replies should be sent to (by any decent email server) so you shouldn't have to worry about an Activity created by a Forms API submission causing an errant "out of the office" style reply from one of your notified staff.
Example
The best way to see an example is to use View Source on our Example forms page: https://www.accelo.com/_resources/app/dev/forms.html. The source code has plenty of comments and advice, and you can enter your own deployment name and actually test pushing form values into your own deployment.