How to display, search, and edit form submissions from a table with WebForm?

Question

I am very new to Drupal and I've been recently assigned a task to make a form for a single admin to register people and their info. It's basically a registration/contact form, except these people aren't users; the admin is just recording their info in a database. The admin needs to be able to search for a person's name through a table for a previous person's registration, and be able to click an edit link for that person as well.

I have been messing around with the WebForm module, and it is great for making the form itself, not to mention it already has a 'Results page' with a table of past submissions. However I do not know of a way to add a search functionality to the 'Results page'.

I also heard that you can put a search bar in Views module, so I messed around with getting the WebForm submission data into a table in Views, thanks to the Data and WebForm SQL Views modules. However I do not know how to put the corresponding edit link next to each of the rows in the table.

Is there a better approach to solving this problem? It seems I have to either handle adding searching functionality for a field, or making it possible to point to the WebForm edit functionality from each row of the Views table.

At this point, I am also wondering if its better to just hand code everything in php.

Answer 1

No, it would not be better to hand-code everything in PHP. However, if you need heavy customization of the display of data the Webform module is probably the wrong approach. Webform is good at getting data in but the options for getting data out are somewhat limited.

Instead, I would make a custom content type and use Views to handle the display. To do so, navigate to /admin/structure/types/add and call it something like "People." Once you perform the basic configuration and click save, you will be taken to the Content types administration page; click manage fields for the content type you just created.

Here, you should be able to add the same kinds of fields that you added in Webform. This interface is not quite as clean as Webform's but it will allow you full flexibility with Views.

Once you have configured the fields as you like, go to the permissions page (/admin/people/permissions/roles) and make sure only the admin role has access to create and edit content of that content type.

Then, configure your view(s). Basically, you'll want a view of node content of the content type you just created. Add the fields you want to display under Fields. To get search filters, add Filters and check Expose this filter to users. When you set up the view(s), make sure to set the permissions using the Views edit interface so that only the admin role can access the views.

This is a very rough overview but hopefully it can get you started in a productive direction.