Metadata is a computing term which means data about data. Apart from storing the actual data and bits of information submitted by our form users, Webform also stores information about the submission itself depending on the following cases:
- When the data was submitted
- The user who submitted the data
- Where the data was submitted from
To make these exercises meaningful we will require an existing Webform where some data has already been submitted. In Chapter 2, Trying Out Webform, we built a Speaker Registration form and entered a few test submissions, so this is the form used in the examples that follow.
Due to the security implications of working with our form user's information, which is often personal to some degree, we also need to ensure that we are logged in to our site as a user that has the necessary Webform data access permissions.
Let's navigate to the Speaker Registration form we created in Chapter 2, Trying Out Webform and then click on the Results tab. By default, we are presented with a table listing the metadata of all submissions that have been made on our Webform.
In the preceding table, we see a summary display of the number of submissions that have been made on our form. When our form gets very busy and attracts a large number of submissions, this summary line will be expanded slightly to allow us to select the number of submissions that should be listed on this page at one time. Along with this, we'll also see links at the bottom of the page to facilitate paging forwards and backwards through the submissions list once the total number of submissions made on the form is greater than 20.
Every submission that is made is assigned its own unique number, known in Webform as the submission ID. The submission ID is automatically incremented per submission, regardless of which Webform the submission was made on. When we have more than one active Webform on our site we will notice that the submission IDs do not appear to be sequential, that numbers are being skipped. We need not worry, as we will find those missing numbers in the submissions listings of our other forms.
The date and time that the form was submitted is determined by the system clock of the server hosting the website and is expressed on screen according to your Drupal installation regional time zone and display format settings.
Should a form be submitted by a logged-in user of your site, the username will be listed in the USER column, otherwise the user is declared Anonymous, that is, unknown. In the case where a submission was made by a registered user, the username will be displayed as a hyperlink that links to that specific user's profile page.
The last bit of metadata presented is IP ADDRESS of the user making a submission. Individual computers and, in some cases, individual networks have numbers assigned to them that are used by the Internet Protocol (IP) to identify the source (address) of Internet traffic. The IP address can be a very useful piece of information to have. For example, analyzing these addresses could help us determine which country networks, even down to company networks, our forms attract the most traffic from.
Under the OPERATIONS column, we find links enabling us to perform one of the CRUD functions on the corresponding submission in that row.
The core Drupal system contains functionality that is automatically available to the contributed module programmers and helps to ensure a consistent user experience by standardizing various aspects of the user interface.
On pages that display table listings, such as the submissions overview page we are currently looking at, we will see that some table headings are rendered as hyperlinks. These headings, when clicked, will re-order the table contents based on the values contained in that column.
When we first came to this submission overview page, the table contents were sorted in descending submission ID sequence, as indicated by the downward pointing arrow in the submission ID column (marked by #). Then, the default listing shows the most recent submission in the top row of the table, whereas the earlier submissions are further down the list.
To rearrange the listing in ascending submission ID sequence, all we need do is click on the # column heading—the page will redisplay the data in ascending sequence and the little arrow will point upwards to indicate that fact.
This particular table is sortable on submission ID, submission date and time, username, or IP address columns. To alternate between ascending and descending sequence, we just click on the relevant heading a second time.