WFFM upgrade issue

Question

I have recently upgraded Sitecore 8.0 update 2 to Sitecore 8.2 update 6. I have also upgraded wffm module according to sitecore version but that destroyed all the existing forms designing. It is also showing some conflicts in jquery. Can someone suggest any quick resolution for this. Also is it possible that we do not upgrade wffm and keep old version to avoid these issues? Thanks

Answer 1

There have been a number of big changes to the WFFM module, especially since the the version you are upgrading from. It is not possible to remain on an older version, you must upgrade the module to the version required for the particular version of Sitecore.

Since the version you were on (8.0 update 6), the WFFM module:

• uses the Bootstrap frontend framework to render and style the forms (since 8.0 update 6)
• introduced dependency injection into various parts of the module
• support to allow storage of response into SQL Server using a provider based model
• module now uses the EventQueue rather than web services to communicate in a multiserver configuration
• as well as numerous other changes

The issue you are facing is most like due to the change in the frontend framework from a custom markup that was used in the earlier WFFM module, to the change to using Bootstrap.

If you are not using Bootstrap on your own site (or even if you are, and want to disable from CSS files from being downloaded twice), you can patch the following setting (normally in Sitecore.MvcForms.config):

<!--Set 'false' if you want disable WFFM bootstrap css loading-->
<setting name="WFM.EnableBootstrapCssRendering" value="true" />

This will allow you to style the markup according to your own requirements. Note that the markup will still conform to Bootstrap, which is significantly different to the pre-Bootstrapped versions of the module (i.e. 8.0 update-2). My recommendation would be to leave the default markup alone and restyle your CSS around it. If you want to change the markup then the cshtml files are located in Website\Views\Form\EditorTemplates folder but note that unlike the older versions, some of the markup is generated using C# helpers so a bit more difficult to change the html. If you go down this route then you may wish to make use of MVC Areas to keep your changes separate.

The conflicts in jQuery may be due to different versions between what your project uses and what the module requires, WFFM 8.2 update-6 uses jQuery 2.1.3. The main form renderer, Views/Form/Index.html, specifies the jQuery and Javascript files which are loaded when you add the MVC Form rendering onto a page. In earlier versions you needed to add references to the module scripts manually but now they are specified by default.

In our past projects, which involved a similar upgrade like yourself, we had to spend a significant amount of time to re-write the CSS to work with the Bootstrap markup (having disabled the CSS using the setting) as well as some customization to the Javascript to work with our own code (and not load multiple versions of jQuery for performance reasons).

Answer 2

when you say the form designing has been destroyed do you mean the styling?

This would happen if you have modified the default style sheet that gets installed with WFFM. You should be overriding styles in a separate file and not modifying default files - this applies for most things Sitecore not just styles.

It’s also possible a different JQuery version has been installed and you have some version specific jQuery or incorrectly scoped JavaScript.

It may be possible for the 8.0 WFFM version to run on8.2 but it is not recommended and won’t be supported. It sounds like you have problems with your FOrms implementation you need to fix rather than work around.