Cordex Forms

Description

Cordex Forms connects your WordPress site to Microsoft Dataverse, the data platform behind Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Apps. You build a submission form in the admin, place its shortcode on a page, and each submission is written to your environment as a new record.

The connection uses a service principal (a Microsoft Entra app registration added to your environment as an application user), so it does not depend on a signed-in person.

What the plugin does

• Connects to one Microsoft Dataverse / Dynamics 365 environment using a service principal. You can test the connection from the admin; the result and its timestamp are saved.
• Builds submission forms in the admin: choose a table, tick the columns you want by display name, and place the generated [cordex_form id="..."] shortcode on any page. There is no limit on the number of forms, and no other plugin is required.
• Supports these Dataverse column types: single-line text, multi-line text, single choice (option set), yes/no, whole number, decimal, float, currency, and date/time. Choice and yes/no options are read from your table’s own metadata. Date/time values are sent in the representation the column’s behaviour requires (UTC for User Local, a bare date for Date Only, wall-clock for Time Zone Independent).
• Validates every submission server-side against the table’s metadata before a record is created. The browser only ever posts values against a saved form id, never field definitions.
• Turns on anti-abuse by default: a nonce, a honeypot field, a minimum fill-time check, and per-IP rate limiting on the submission endpoint (10 submissions per 10 minutes by default).
• Queues submissions when Dataverse is unreachable. Accepted submissions are stored locally, encrypted at rest, and retried automatically with exponential backoff and jitter, honouring any Retry-After the service sends. The visitor still sees the normal success message. Items that cannot succeed are parked on the Queue screen for review, retry, or discard, and the site administrator is emailed (at most once every six hours).
• Records consent: an optional required consent checkbox with your own wording. Each edit of the wording appends a new immutable version to the form’s history, and queued submissions record the version and UTC timestamp they were submitted under.
• Captures submission context server-side: landing page, referrer and browser user agent, plus the visitor’s IP address stored full, truncated, hashed, or not at all, as you choose. UTM parameters and Google/Meta/Microsoft click ids are captured only when the visitor consents. Each detail can be written to a text column on the record or kept local only.
• Lays out forms in one to three columns of titled sections, with optional column widths, button and colour theming, twelve presets, and themes you can save and reuse. Unset options inherit your active WordPress theme.
• Encrypts the client secret at rest in your database using the PHP sodium extension. The secret is write-only: once saved it is never rendered or returned by any screen or endpoint.
• Guards the environment URL against SSRF: only Microsoft-operated Dataverse and Dynamics hosts are accepted, checked both when saved and again before every outbound request. Redirects are never followed.
• Integrates with the WordPress privacy tools: the personal-data exporter and eraser cover the plugin’s queued submissions.
• Exports and imports the whole configuration as a JSON file for backup or migration. Client secrets are never written to an export.
• Uninstalls cleanly, removing the plugin’s options, table, scheduled event and cached tokens, with an opt-in setting to retain data for a migration.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.2 or later and PHP 7.4 or later.
• The PHP sodium extension (sodium_crypto_secretbox). It is required, not optional: the plugin encrypts credentials with it and will not start without it. Sodium is bundled with PHP 7.2 and later on most hosts.
• Your own Microsoft Dataverse / Dynamics 365 environment, and an application user (service principal) with privileges to create rows on the tables you write to. Cordex Forms does not provide the Microsoft environment.

Cordex Forms Pro

Everything described in this readme is included in this plugin and is fully functional as installed. Nothing here is limited, timed, restricted by quota, or unlocked by a key, and the plugin contains no licensing code of any kind. Cordex Forms Pro is a separate plugin, installed alongside this one, for sites whose tables need column types and features this plugin does not implement:

• Lookup, Customer, Owner and party-list columns, with live record search.
• File and image upload columns, and multi-select choice columns.
• Related-record writes, and submitting in a specific Dataverse user’s security context.
• Reading Dataverse data back out to the site: data grids and record pages.
• More than one environment, and an overview of which component targets which environment.

Details: https://myitandapps.com.au/products/cordex-forms/ – support: cordex-forms@myitandapps.com.au

External services

This plugin contacts two remote endpoints, both of them Microsoft services that you configure. It does not contact the plugin author or any other third party.

1. Microsoft Entra ID – login.microsoftonline.com

Used to obtain the OAuth 2.0 access token that authorises every call to your Dataverse environment.

• What is sent: an HTTP POST to https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant id}/oauth2/v2.0/token, with your Microsoft Entra tenant id in the URL path and, in the request body, grant_type=client_credentials, the application (client) id, the client secret, and a scope of {your environment URL}/.default. These are the credentials you entered on the Environments screen. No visitor data and no form data are ever sent to this endpoint.
• When it happens: only when the site does not already hold a valid cached token. The token is cached in a WordPress transient for the lifetime Microsoft reports, less sixty seconds – typically about one hour – so under continuous use the endpoint is called roughly once an hour. It is also called when you use Test connection.
• Service terms: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/
• Privacy statement: https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement

2. Your own Microsoft Dataverse / Dynamics 365 environment

This is the environment URL you enter on the Environments screen, for example https://yourorg.crm6.dynamics.com. It is your own Microsoft tenant, under your own agreement with Microsoft. It is not a service operated by the author of this plugin, and the author has no access to it.

• What is read: table, column and choice metadata from the Web API (EntityDefinitions, Attributes, option sets), plus a WhoAmI call when you use Test connection. Metadata responses are cached locally for about ten minutes.
• What is written: one record per submission, created with POST /api/data/v9.2/{entity set}. The record contains the values the visitor entered in the form’s fields, and – only for the details you have explicitly mapped to a column on the Shortcodes screen – the landing page URL, the HTTP referrer, the browser user agent, the visitor’s IP address in the form your IP mode produces (full, truncated, hashed, or omitted entirely), and, when the visitor has ticked the consent box, the utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content parameters and the gclid, fbclid and msclkid click ids. A per-submission correlation reference and the consent version are also written where you have mapped columns for them. Details you have not mapped are never sent to Dataverse.
• When it happens: on every form submission; when an administrator opens the form builder or saves a form, to read metadata (subject to the ten-minute cache); when you use Test connection; and on an unattended scheduled task. That scheduled task is a WordPress cron event that runs every five minutes, claims up to ten queued submissions that are due, and attempts to deliver them to your environment. It is registered when the plugin is activated and removed when it is deactivated, and it will make outbound requests without an administrator being present whenever the queue is not empty.
• Terms and privacy for this endpoint are those of your own Microsoft agreement; see https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/ and https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement

No data is sent to the plugin author or to any third party. The plugin performs no analytics, telemetry, usage tracking, update checks or remote logging of any kind.

Bundled fonts

The plugin’s admin screens use two open-source typefaces, both bundled with the plugin and served from your own site. No CDN or external font service is contacted.

• Inter, copyright the Inter Project Authors, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Plus Jakarta Sans, copyright the Plus Jakarta Sans Project Authors, SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The full licence text for each is included in assets/fonts/ as ofl-inter.txt and ofl-plusjakartasans.txt. The font files are used only in wp-admin; the front-end form ships no stylesheet and inherits your active theme.

Trademarks and affiliation

Cordex Forms is an independent product developed by My IT & Apps Pty Ltd. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. “Microsoft”, “Microsoft Entra”, “Microsoft Dataverse”, “Dynamics 365”, “Power Apps” and “Power Platform” are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. “WordPress” is a trademark of the WordPress Foundation. These names are used only to describe compatibility.

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