Unable to execute script after contact form 7 submit

Question

When I execute this code it doesn't do anything except there comes up a spinning icon underneath the contact form which spins forever.

add_action( 'wpcf7_before_send_mail', 'process_contact_form_data' );

function process_contact_form_data( $contact_data ){
    var_dump($contact_data->posted_data);
    $name = $contact_data->posted_data["your-name"];
    $email = $contact_data->posted_data["your-email"];

    echo $name ;
    echo $email;                
}

Answer 1

You can't echo the output of wpcf7_before_send_mail because there's no place to echo it to. The form process is all ajax.

You can however output it to the error_log or to a file. This is an example of outputting the form data to the error_log.

add_action('wpcf7_before_send_mail', 'output_cf7_form_data');
function output_cf7_form_data(){
    // Call the form data from the static instance of the class
    $submission = WPCF7_Submission::get_instance();

    if ( $submission ) {
        // assign the posted data to an array
        $posted_data = $submission->get_posted_data();
        $name = $posted_data["your-name"];
    }
    // Use Output Buffering to print_r form data to the error log
    ob_start();
    print_r($posted_data);
    echo 'Posted Name is ' . $name;
    $body = ob_get_clean();
    error_log($body);
}

If you were so inclined, you could change the part about putting it to the error log, and use fwrite to post the information to a file.

If you want to look at this Contact Form 7 to Constant Contact API method I used to work with the constant contact API, you can see how I use before send mail to capture the form data, but push to the API after wpcf7_mail_sent is completed so that the form submission isn't waiting for the API call to finish, and the user doesn't see the little ajax spinner while the API call happens.