virtuemart profile fields missing in children registration

Hello,
I've successfully setup the "Buy courses on behalf of children" functionality, but I have a problem.
When registering new children (I use it to allow employers to register employees) only name, username,email and password are required.
I need to add all the required fields I've setup in virtuemart profile.
If this is not possible, does anyone know if there is a VM plugin to force the profile completion on first login?
Thank you.
Regards

Hi there,

To be sure I understand you correctly, you want the children / employees to complete their profile details when they log in the first time (ie after their account has been created by their employer).

Have the employees already been enrolled into the course or do they do that by themselves?
Are you forcing them to login with VM or are they logging in with the Joomla or another login extension?

If they employees are just logging in and going straight to the course, you can use one of the 3rd party plugins that checks for profile being complete. This assumes that you have some form of profile extension or have extended the profile with Joomla's plugin.

If they are logging in and then buying the course themselves using VM, then just make the required fields mandatory. During checkout if the required user fields are not entered, VM will redirect the user to the profile form and the user will be required to complete.

There will be other ways to achieve what you want using user profile extensions, plugins, etc. these plus the above are outside of Joomdle. Joomdle will just take whatever information you provide it and syncronise that data with Moodle (assuming you have installed the appropriate Joomdle plugins and configured and mapped the data).

Hi,
the best solution would be that when the "parent" registers new "children", he is forced to compile all the required fields in order to register the child.
My problem is that now not all virtuemart user profile fields are displayed on the children registration page: only name, username, email and password. I want to show a full registration form on that page.
If this is not possible in any way, then I'll try to consider some workaround.

Thanks. I understand the main requirement is that you want the employer to enter all that information for the child and not have the child enter it himself/herself. The challenge with this is that the 'required' fields for your system would be different than the required fields for other websites. Thus functionality would need to be added to:
1. Manage custom fields because maybe you have only 3 more fields and somebody else has 5 additional custom fields;
2. Determine if they are required fields during registration
3. Provide interfaces for users to manage the fields after registration
4. Create additional mapping areas to map these custom fields to joomla, moodle and 3rd party extensions such as VM, Hikashop, Jomsocial, Easyprofile etc. etc. all extensions that Joomdle integrates with.

Basically, we would be creating a user profile system (or system with user profile management) which is what Joomdle already integrates with ie VM, Hikashop, Mijoshop, J2Store, Community Builder, EasySocial, JomSocial, JoomProfile, EasyProfolie, Joomla Profile, JoomShopping, Payplans, AEC - all of which have user profile fields and ways to manage these custom fields.

This would require custom development requiring at minimum:
- adding more fields to the registration page
- updating of those fields to the VM user tables
- updating of those fields to Moodle

If you are interested in such development you can send an email to development@joomdle.com and we can discuss your specific needs further and determine the feasibility.

Hi, thanks for your reply.
I'm wondering why it looks so complicated to extend the registration form. I've not looked at the code yet, but I know that Joomdle already integrates with virtuemart user profile and is able to collect the virtuemart user profile fields.
Joomdle is also able to map those fields with Moodle fields.
At this point the only missing element seems to be a plugin or a method to show those fields in the children registration form.

Conceptually, extending the fields for VM alone is not that difficult as you have indicated. In fact, adding a few fields on the page is pretty simple - minutes of work not days. This you can do yourself

However to make this part of Joomdle, would not extending the fields for VM alone as we would need the flexibility to extend for every extension that Joomdle integrate with eg. VM, Hikashop, Mijoshop, J2Store, Community Builder, EasySocial, JomSocial, JoomProfile, EasyProfolie, Joomla Profile, JoomShopping, Payplans, AEC. Each one of these stores data differently than VM using different tables, field names, APIs, plugins etc.

Furthermore, even if they all used the same fields, tables, etc. what fields you extend with maybe different than another person. Eg. You may want street, city, country, postal and phone. Somebody else may want street, house number, building, country, state, postal, mobile, phone, phone2, fax, department, next of kin. And even within one particular extension, say VM, you can add custom fields which you may want available in your registration process and somebody else does not. Thus any new feature in Joomdle needs to cater for different users / scenarios.

Finally all this needs to work with Moodle.

Thus a proper job is likely to require a new Joomdle section which allows you to add new fields, label them and then map them to extensions you integrate with. This could be VM, EasySocial, Kunena and Acymailing.

Due to the above complexity, it is likely to require some time. That said a 100% custom solution just for you would require less time but it would not be made available as part of the core code and you would need to manage updates in the future.

> At this point the only missing element seems to be a plugin or a method to show those fields in the children registration form.

> Thus a proper job is likely to require a new Joomdle section which allows you to add new fields, label them and then map them to extensions you integrate with

I think this could be a nice addition, but as Chris says, it is not a basic modification, even if most of the work is joining existing code toguether. I am going to move this to Feature Requests, but I can't tell you how long it could take us to implement.

As Chris says, this will need a new "profile fields" section, where you could select fields to add to children registration page, from the ones existing in the extension selected to use as additional data source.
But I think this should not go into core Joomdle package, as I would prefer not to complicate the basic functions. Maybe it is time to have a Joomdle-children package, to complement Joomdle core. We could move all children-related Joomdle stuff in Joomdle to this new package, so only users using children features would see them.

What do you both think?

Hi,
now I'm trying to modify the form with a template override, but I've got an idea.
One may modify the "registration" view in joomdle so that it supports plugins.
The concept is modifying the view and the template so that the registration form is generated from a list of
fields (e.g. an array) which can be modified by a plugin.
I think that the following step should be accomplished:
- put the basic form fields in an array in the view.html.php (in the "register" view)
- triggering a onBeforeDisplayJoomdleChildrenRegistrationForm event in the view.html.php, passing the array (by reference?) to this method
- if the plugin has to modify the fields, it will do it, otherwise everything will remain unchanged
- in the tmpl/default.php generate the form html code taking the fields from the array (modified by the plugin or not)

This would be much simpler and would let the control of extra fields to the external components.
Am I missing something?

Yes, what you say is what is needed.
But you also need a way to decide which fields you want to show. The nicest way to configure is using a view, although there are simpler methods.
And also implement functions to save the info entered to the real component (VM, Jomsocial, etc) as in your points you just showed the fields, but did nothing with the info. This functions should call new events, as each 3rd party component has its own store methods.
Finally, we would need to write code to trigger Joomdle sync functions so that any fields that are mapped to Moodle are also synced.