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Good question right, how can you access event registration custom questions and answers? Sometimes something that seems it should be so easy is not all that simple to find or understand. I must admit, even though I’ve used a few custom (or unmapped) fields on forms, I hadn’t started collecting any extra feedback for myself on an event registration form. When you just add fields for a Contact for an Event, it’s pretty easy to see all that information on a list of Event Registrations. If you’ve started using unmapped fields for Events, do you know how it all works and hangs together? I hope my digging and poking around a bit helps give you some light bulb moments of your own.
First, this is what I am referring to. You can add unmapped fields on to an Event (and Marketing) registration form. However, unmapped fields you add and save on a regular marketing form are not available to add to an event registration form and vice versa. When you add a field, give it a logical field name, something that makes sense rather than the generated name it will be given by default. For example, all of my attendee questions have that as a prefix to make them easier to find later on. You can then still use your placeholder text and also set the label for the question.
On the form submission for the Event Registration, we can see the Display name comes from the label on the form, then the logical name you set, and the value is the response given.
If you go to the out of the box Event form (not a customised one) the registration and attendance tab is MAGICAL! 🪄 There is a view just for my event, and it just knows what information to display! Woohoo! How on earth does it actually know though? Also, notice that it has a link to the registration and the full name of the Contact and their Email which is on the new views by default.
Right so this is where the digging comes in. Looking at that tab on the form in the editor and seeing what it is pulling from, it is showing Event registrations. Hmm, but how does it get all the custom fields in the columns? Well, the Event registration custom field table is the answer. Add new fields (you don’t even need to save them for future use) and you can see them in the list of fields (columns) like you see below. This is truly a thing of beauty. If you are using a custom form, you will be unlikely to get this all working without taking a copy of the out of the box form. There are over 50 scripts that run and many fields you might not even have on your form that are still needed to make it all work.
But how does it know to add them to that view for the Event? Well, again, on the Event Registration table we can see that there is a view created for each event where I added in some custom unmapped fields. I love this. 😍
If I open the view for the May webinar, the filter is the Event where I used those fields. Everything is created and populated for me.
What is actually happening is that a hidden field is being populated with the GUID from the new view created so that it shows the overview with the custom fields by default when you look at the Registration and attendance tab.
I figured I would see what I can do in terms of changing the view and columns slightly to see what impact it had on other things. I renamed the new fields that were created in the Event Registration Custom field table, so they were shortened rather than being the full label from the form.
I then moved things around and removed a lot of the other fields that I didn’t want. This gives me what I truly need. Now I am not suggesting you do that each time, but I found it helpful to understand that I can do this if I needed or wanted to for a given event.
From here I can easily export the view of the registrations along with the answers given on my custom fields. Awesome!
Check out the latest post:
Use Custom Event Registration Questions To Branch Your Journeys In Customer Insights
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Dear Megan,
I’ve read your post (https://meganvwalker.com/access-event-registration-custom-questions-cij/) and was wondering whether this option is also available for custom forms.
I’d be very grateful if you could let me know.
Best regards,
Tobias
Not in the same way Tobias, but I am not 100% certain of what you mean by custom forms. Do you mean regular marketing forms with unmapped fields? If so, all of the values submitted should be in the msdynmkt_marketingfieldsubmission table. So if you go to one of the form submissions for your form with your unmapped fields, then scroll to the bottom, all of the questions with their submitted values should be there. You can open those individual records and see they are from that msdynmkt_marketingfieldsubmission table. So you could try and do something to get the information out from there?
Thank you for the post!
Happy to see that your Event Registration Custom Field table also contains the standard mapped fields as cuf_, such as “emailaddress1” that became “cuf_emailaddress1”.
I’ve been wondering, the OTB Event registration form uses old HTML style compred to the RTM forms.
Any idea on how to use a more modern based form structure in the event module, without messing it up?
Or is, maybe, an update coming from Microsoft on this?
oooh hmmm. not sure, sorry for the delay too Vince!
You might want to try creating a marketing form, then copying the HTML and looking at the HTML from a registration form. Likely there isn’t much between the two in terms of relating to Events and could be easy to slot in what you need to make it work.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by the “out-of-the-box event form.”
We use our own CSS styling to maintain consistent branding across our marketing and event forms, and we also rely on a number of custom fields to collect additional information that we require for our events.
As far as I am aware, the responses to these custom fields are currently only available through the form submissions stored in the msdynmkt_marketingfieldsubmission table. This makes it quite difficult to get a clear and consolidated overview of the submitted data.
To address this, we have built a Power BI solution that aggregates all submitted responses into a single table, making the data much easier to review and work with.
However, our preferred approach would be to have this functionality available directly within Customer Insights – Journeys, rather than relying on an external reporting solution.
Given our setup, would this still be possible, or are there any additional restrictions that would prevent it?
Hi Filiz, there are two standard (or out of the box) forms for events – Default registration form and Default registration form with Sessions. Those are the ones I am referring to.
You should be able to go to a URL like this: https://YOUR-CRM-URL.com/main.aspx?pagetype=entitylist&etn=msevtmgt_eventregistrationcustomfield – then create a view by adding your columns and filtering, or do this in a solution for a System View.
So yes, the data is all there, it’s just not in the navigation of CI-J by default, although you could certainly add it to make it easier for users to review in bulk.