CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm about to start working on code to manage event sign-in sheets.  Many of our events don't include advanced registration, but we are required to track attendance all the same.  For speed and convenience, this is done through sign-in sheets at the door which are entered after the event.  My plan is to create a revised "Register New Participant" form which carries forward that data from Event, Role, Status, and Source fields, when the data entry clerk selects "Save and New".  This seems like an obvious feature to me, so if I'm re-inventing the wheel, I'd certainly appreciate it if someone could show me a better way.

The webform and webform_civicrm modules may be useful to you, since you could create a form that registers a large number of people in one shot (regardless of if they are already in the db or not). Check the new contact clone feature to simplify form creation. (read the readme for more)

Thank you for the leads! Xavier, your work sounds like it may be quite helpful. I'll watch to see if some of that code can be made available.  Meanwhile I'll take a stab at the webform approach.

Here's a more complete picture of our problem.  We are a University center and we hold regular seminars that attract between 50 and 200 participants.  Attendance is open and free but we are required by the funding agency to track it.  Also, seminar attendees make up a large part of our mailing list.  Lots of people attend multiple seminars.  Usually about half of the participants on a sheet already have CiviCRM records, so it's important that the registration method not be one that is prone to creating a lot of duplicates.  Since the sign in is usually hand-written and people often use varying versions of their own name it's always a little tricky, but we try to reduce duplication as much as possible. In the past I've entered the records into an Excel spreadsheet then imported them, then spent a couple hours cleaning up the mess that results.  Entering multiple records on a single form would be ideal, as long as it didn't sacrifice the db look-up present on the "Register New Participant" form or the ability to create new individuals "on-the-fly". 

Looks great!

So each event is a regular civicrm event?

By hash, you mean the regular contact.checksum?

X+

Other cool things you'll notice in that form:
- Auto show/hide additional contacts thanks to the webform_conditional module
- Clicking "same as my address" will create a shared address (and hide unneeded fields - a standard feature now in webform_civicrm)
- newsletter signup checkbox adds you to a civicrm group
- and yes, the events listed at the top are civicrm events. webform_civicrm allows you to create a single form element that accepts multiple values (checkboxes) to easily work with multiple events at once.
- country/state chain-select - also a standard webform_civicrm feature added in v2.0