Gravity Forms gform_after_submission File Names and URLs

One of my current projects has me working with Rocketgenuis’ Gravity Forms. It’s a great drag-and-drop form builder plugin for WordPress, and it’s quite extensible. I’m sure it’s got tons of other features, but I had to figure out something specific using what Gravity Forms gave me.

The project I’m working on needed a little more than just data collection from a form. It requires me to send files uploaded via Gravity Forms to a third-party API. That’s where the gform_after_submission hook comes in. Unfortunately, the entry parameter passed through the hook gives us URLs instead of a path to the local file.¹ On top of that, it turns out you can use the gform_upload_path filter to alter the storage path for individual forms.

So What’s a Developer to Do?

I had to dig through the Gravity Forms code, but did I find a couple of useful functions for our purposes. The GFFormsModel class has static methods get_upload_path and get_upload_dir, both of which take a form id and return the necessary URL or directory.

Tools in hand, we can do some basic string manipulation to get what we’re after.

<?php
 
add_action( 'gform_after_submission_1', 'my_gform_after_submission_1', 10, 2 );
 
function my_gform_after_submission_1( $entry, $form ) {
 
  $form_id = $entry[ 'form_id' ];
 
  $upload_path = GFFormsModel::get_upload_path( $form_id );
  $upload_url = GFFormsModel::get_upload_url( $form_id );
 
  $filename = str_replace( $upload_url, $upload_path, $entry[ '1' ] );
 
  // Now we can manipulate the local file as needed
  // Move it, copy it, send it to another service
}

The above code makes a few assumptions about your form. The _1 added to the submission action hook is indicative of the id of the form. And the index ‘1’ in the $entry array is indicative of the control id in the form. These are things that may vary with your individual form.

But now you’ve got access to the local file to manipulate as you see fit.