Gravity Forms Appointment Field

This guide applies to:

Basic Edition
Plus Edition
Pro Edition
Business Edition

In this document:

Introduction
- What You Need First
Video Walkthrough
Using the Appointment Form Field in Gravity Forms
Booking a Time Slot with Gravity Forms
- Pending Form Submission Status
Managing Booked Gravity Forms Appointments
Sending Customer and Admin Notifications
- Gravity From Notifications
Conditional Logic and Varying Prices
Gravity Wiz Perks

Introduction

Use Gravity Forms to create complex appointment booking forms using Simply Schedule Appointments (SSA). With Gravity Forms, you can make booking forms that include conditional logic and many more advanced fields.

Potential Use Cases:

Direct visitors to specific appointment types based on their information
Custom confirmation pages after booking
Robust Payment options

What You Need First

Gravity Forms installed and activated, including their Basic, Pro, Elite, or Developer plan.
Go through the Setup Wizard in SSA and finish setting up your Booking Calendar rules and styling.

If you plan on taking payments through Gravity Forms, make sure you’re using a Gravity Forms Edition that accepts payments – not all of their plugin tiers do.

Video Walkthrough

Using the Appointment Form Field in Gravity Forms

Go to your WordPress Dashboard > Forms > Add New to create a new form for booking appointments.

First, make sure to include the basic fields that SSA requires to log appointments:

Name
Email

Add the Appointment field to your form to let people choose a time slot. Find it under Advanced Fields > Appointment.

Adding the Name, Email, and Appointment fields to a form

Appointment field

The Appointment field settings let you choose whether you’d like to display All the Appointment Types, a single Appointment Type, Appointment Types belonging to a Label, or a subset of Appointment Types (assuming you’ve created multiple Types in the SSA dashboard).

You’ll also need to tie the Name and Email fields to SSA using the Form Field dropdowns. By default, Gravity Forms will automatically tie the Name, Email, and Phone fields.

SMS Opt-In Field

To make sure the SMS notification feature in SSA works with Gravity Forms, you’ll need to add a Consent field from the Advanced Fields section and map it to the Opt-In Form Field Dropdown on the Appointments field.

If the user selects the checkbox, SSA will continue with the SMS-sending process set up through the booking plugin.

Choosing an Appointment Type for the form

Conditional Logic Based on the Appointment Field

The Appointment Field can be used as a rule in other fields’ conditional logic. The only accepted values to compare with the Appointment field are to evaluate whether the field is empty or not.

The appointment field is filled in: Field is not (empty)
The appointment field is empty: Field is (empty)

Leave the value field in the conditional logic rule blank/empty. Learn more about Gravity Forms’ conditional logic based on Empty fields.

Conditional logic using a rule containing the Appointment field

Add the booking form to your website

After that, you should be able to add your form to any WordPress page or post. Use the Gravity Forms’ shortcode or block.

You could also create other fields to collect customer information for the appointment.

All the information collected in Gravity Forms will be passed to SSA except for admin and hidden fields.

Booking a Time Slot with Gravity Forms

Visitors will use your form to enter their information and choose an Appointment Time Slot.

When they choose a time slot, they’ll see a confirmation of their time. After they’ve filled in the required details and selected a time, they can submit the form.

Booking a time slot with a basic form

Pending Form Submission Status

When a time slot is selected in a booking form created through Gravity Forms, an appointment is immediately recorded and marked as Pending Form Submission.

SSA will give the user 60 minutes to fill out their form if SSA still needs feedback from Gravity Forms on form submission. SSA marks this appointment as Abandoned.

Additionally, if the form submission happens within those 60 minutes, the appointment is marked as Booked.

When an appointment is selected with this Pending Form Submission status, you can mark the appointment as Abandoned, or keep the Appointment.

Learn more about the Booking Status and how to extend the 60-minute pending period, and how to manage pending bookings.

Managing Booked Gravity Forms Appointments

When you view the entry in the Gravity Forms, you’ll see a summary of the details and a link to manage the appointment in SSA.

In SSA, you should see all the Gravity Forms field details along with a link to view the entry in Gravity Forms.

Hidden/Admin Fields

As a security measure, any hidden or admin fields are not collected for display on the SSA Appointments pages. This is to ensure sensitive information like admin notes or passwords is not displayed to users through the Google Invite feature or the notifications.

If you’d like to bypass this functionality, read our guide on how to pass hidden fields to SSA.

Viewing appointments from the booking form

Canceling Gravity Form Appointments

Firstly, to cancel an appointment, go to WordPress Dashboard > Appointments > Click on the Appointment you’d like to cancel > Click Cancel this Appointment > Confirm Cancellation.

The entry in Gravity Forms will need to be deleted separately as well. Canceling in SSA doesn’t affect those entries.

Canceling an appointment through SSA ensures that the time slot is opened again on the Booking Calendar.

Appointments can’t be canceled or deleted from the Gravity Forms entries page. If you delete an entry, SSA will still hold the record of the appointment.

Overhead Calendar View of Booked Gravity Forms Appointments

At this time, the Appointments fields are not yet compatible with the GravityView add-on.

If you’d like to have a Calendar View of your booked appointments, you could sync SSA with Google Calendar.

Sending Customer and Admin Notifications

You could use either Gravity Forms or SSA to send your clients notifications and reminders.

We recommend using SSA to send text messages or email notifications. Since this will make sure that you can send the following:

clients a unique cancelation/rescheduling link
tailored emails depending on the Appointment Types booked
you and your clients get cancelation emails

Please remember that if you use Gravity Forms for the notifications, you must disable the default email notifications in SSA. They are set up to automatically send once you finish the Setup Wizard.

Gravity From Notifications

We also support merge tags in Gravity Forms. We have a guide to go over all of the merge tags.

And here are some guides to setting up email notifications with Gravity Forms.

Conditional Logic and Varying Prices

To learn more about using Gravity Forms to create robust and complex booking forms, we’ve put together the following guides:

Gravity Wiz Perks

Finally, you can check out our guide on Gravity Perks that we recommend using along with the Simply Schedule Appointments & Gravity Forms integration.

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