Customer feedback via URL

[sal88]

Hi all

We have the following concept for receiving customer feedback:

Staff close a support ticket and then click 'request feedback'
Email with 3 feedback links (i.e. good, bad, average) is sent to customer
They click one of the links
A new record is created in our database, including both the feedback, and the associated ticket ID.

Does this sound possible?
Thanks

 

[webko]

Fairly trivial with Custom Web Publishing.. Although personally I'd up the ante a bit, and send them to a feedback form.

[sal88]

CWP is unknown territory to me. Could you advise me on the best place to start?
Thanks

[sal88]

Guess I'd better read this http://bluefeathergroup.com/blog/introduction-to-filemaker-custom-web-publishing-cwp/

How would the feeback link work though? What aspect of CWP would it be utilising?

Edited May 4, 2016 by sal88

[webko]

The feedback link would point to a php page on a web server, which itself then performs a New Record with the relevant information to the FileMaker database on FileMaker Server

[sal88]

So all URLs would point to the same PHP page, but they would also contain specific data (ticket ID, feedback rating)?

Edited May 5, 2016 by sal88

[webko]

Approximately yes.

There are some wrinkles around how to stop the links being spoofed, spammed and used inappropriately, but that's what it boils down to.

As I said, I would set it up so they went to a feedback page but if you go the links route, I would also not directly expose the ticket ID or rating to the end user - I'd obfuscate the URL, and have an algorithm on the other end to pull out the relevant data.

ie, url might look like http://mycompany.com/feedback.php?j=45526235623&k=ADFGRF&m=435121

And my handler might use the value for j to determine the ticketID and the 4th position in m for the rating - this is _not_ secure, but for a simple feedback link should be OK.

If nothing matches the j value, it's probably someone trying to spoof the link. I'd probably write that to a log file along with the originating IP address etc to track if someone is deliberately trying to influence the feedback.

Hope this helps

[doughemi]

@sal88

The difference between what you are proposing and what Webko suggested is that your solution has FM pulling the data from the php via a URL. His solution has the php page pushing the data to FileMaker via the CWP API commands to add records, set fields, etc. These are analogous to similar commands in a script.

I agree with him that pushing the data from a form is preferable.

In either case, as he recommended, strong data validation is a must.

Edited May 6, 2016 by doughemi

[sal88]

Excellent! Looking forward to implementing this. I'll start with the URL and then no doubt move on the form as something tells me we're going to want more detail from the client.

Thanks guys

[sal88]

How do I specify within the PHP file that the new values are to be retrieved from the URL?

[webko]

<?php
 $ticketID = $_REQUEST['j'];
 $rating = $_REQUEST['m'];
?>

Will pull the attributes j and m from the URL and populate the variables $ticketID and $rating to then be inserted into the database

[sal88]

thank you webko!