Using Creator To Manage My Petition

Greetings Creator fans. You probably saw my name mentioned a few weeks back when Pete invited me to be an author on the site. I’ve been very busy with adjusting to the full-time student life, and I have to say I love it.

In this, my inaugural post on LandofZC, I wanted to share a *very* simple application that took me two minutes to set up and hopefully will generate some results. I’m starting a petition that will hopefully bring wireless Internet to the building that most of my classes are in at ASU. (Read the full rant here.) So I am using an application created with Zoho to manage the people who sign my petition. It’s a ridiculously amateur application consisting of:

1. Name Field
2. Email Field
3. Three Optional Question Fields

Nothing fancy. Nothing pretentious. I’m hoping this geeky grassroots movement will get me some wireless goodness in the near future. Or at least a little attention from the suits at the University. I’ll let you know how it goes.

View the Application. (Sign it if you’re an ASU student!)

Use JSON to deliver Zoho Creator content to your Web site

Hi everyone…my name is Doug Lockwood (AKA Lockworld), and I’ve been invited to join the Land of ZC blog. I’m excited to be here! I first started using Zoho Creator over a year ago, and was amazed at what I could do. However, I could never think of anything to do with it until a few months ago when I decided to start using it to build an online catalog of products/services for my Web site. Since then, I’ve been busy pushing the limits of Zoho Creator, and I’m very impressed! I’m also quite impressed with the Land of ZC…Pete has done an outstanding job of delving deep into the heart of Zoho Creator, and I’ve used the tips and tricks he’s provided to help get me through some of the rough spots. Naturally, when he invited me to share some of my ideas on this blog, I couldn’t resist. I am excited about this opportunity, and I hope you find my contributions useful.

If you’ve used Zoho Creator, you’re probably already familiar with exporting your forms and views as iframes or JavaScript codes to embed on your own Web site. In addition, you can find links to PDF, RSS, HTML, XLS, CSV, and other views of the data you have collected. These are very nice features, but there was one exportable feature that I had a little trouble figuring out…JSON feeds. If you click on the link to a JSON feed, you might see a bunch of garbled HTML. For example, I created a sample online catalog application to showcase my e-commerce solution a while back. I wanted to see what the JSON feed was all about, but when I clicked on the link, I saw quite a mess in my browser, as you can see in this link.

Little did I know how useful JSON would prove to be!

I did a Google search for JSON, and was able to find out a little more about it. Essentially, JSON is a very simplified JavaScript code that can turn your entire Zoho Creator view into a single variable using a form of nested arrays.

Parsing the codes out was a little bit tricky at first, but once I got the hang of it, it became fairly easy. You can add a simple tag to your Web page to load the JSON/JavaScript variable by using a script tag:


<script
src="http://creator.zoho.com/{USERNAME}/json/{VIEWNUMBER}/" mce_src="http://creator.zoho.com/{USERNAME}/json/{VIEWNUMBER}/"
></script>


Then in a separate script tag you can begin to parse out the values. Let’s try a simple example using the JSON feed described above…

Here’s a basic script that will display all of the product information available on this sample catalog directly in your Web site:


<script src="http://creator.zoho.com/lockworld/json/6/" mce_src="http://creator.zoho.com/lockworld/json/6/"></script>
<script>
for (var j=0; j<zoholockworldview6.catalog_example.length; j++){
var NewArray=zoholockworldview6.catalog_example[j];
var ItemName = NewArray.Item_name;
var ItemPrice = NewArray.Item_price;
var PayPal = NewArray.PayPal;
var Description = NewArray.Description;
var DetailLink = NewArray.DetailLink;
document.writeln("<p><b><i>" + ItemName + "</i></b>");
document.writeln(" $" + ItemPrice);
document.writeln("<br>");
document.writeln(PayPal);
document.writeln("<br>");
document.writeln(Description);
document.writeln("<br>");
document.writeln(DetailLink);
document.writeln("</p><hr>");
}
</script>


Please keep in mind that Zoho Creator sometimes changes your field names to avoid using spaces or unsupported characters, so look through your code to be sure that you have all of the correct field names or you’ll end up with nothing on your page.

Why use JSON instead of the default JavaScript Zoho Creator provides?

As a general rule, the JavaScript codes provided by Zoho Creator (look for the “Embed in your website” link under “More Actions” in any of your forms or views) are adequate for most users. However, there may be times when you need to customize the way the information is displayed in a way that Zoho Creator cannot support by default (by specifying font colors/attributes for specific fields, etc.).

Privacy

One benefit to JSON scripts is that you can use them on your Web page to display information from an otherwise private Zoho Creator view (if you enable private hyperlinks). So, if you don’t want people to be able to access the information in your application from the Zoho Creator site, you can keep the view private and use a private hyperlink to display the information on your own site exclusively.

Filtering

Furthermore, you can use this powerful scripting tool to filter out certain elements to further customize your page. You might want to pass some attributes to your Web site through the URL that can be compared to fields within the JSON feed to determine whether or not to display the information. I could very easily add a condition to the script above to only display items with a price below, say, $5.00. So it would be very easy to add another page to my online catalog that would only display the cheapest items for those who did not want to fish through all of my products.

Variable data

Another use for JSON feeds is to display variable data on a single Web page. For an example, see my online catalog ? I realize that I only have one product currently for sale, but you should get the idea about how this can work. Each of my products contains a “details” link (automatically created when I enter a new product into my Zoho Creator application) that takes you to the same ProductDetails.aspx page and passes a specific product code via the URL. The scripts on my page look at this value and determine which product information from the JSON script to display. So I only have to create one Web page to display any and all of my product details, regardless of how many (or few!) I have.

Combining Applications

If you want to get even more advanced, you can combine information from multiple Zoho Creator applications by accessing more than one JSON feed on a single page…this might be a way to provide a level of security to your page by requiring that a person enter a unique ID or confirmation code from one Zoho Creator application on your page before displaying information from a different application…so you can have your “authorized users” application and all of your other applications available separately, but working together on your page. You should warn your users that this information can be hacked quite easily, so they shouldn’t provide a real username/password combination, or provide any other information they want to protect, but for a general level of usability, this provides some strong functionality.

Conclusion

Using Zoho Creator and JSON scripts, I have not only been able to create an online catalog with full PayPal support, but I have also created a content management system that allows me to add, remove, or edit records directly in Zoho Creator and have the updates automatically applied directly on my Web site. I will talk more about using Zoho Creator’s JSON feeds to create a content management system for your entire Web site in upcoming posts on The Web for You.

Now that’s powerful stuff, especially from a free Web tool!

Uncommon Support

I ran across this article from a little over a month ago and wanted to pass it along. It’s a great example of just one reason why Zoho Creator is head and shoulders above competing products, spectacular support:

The next morning the entire development team from Zoho Creator called me from India. It seems that a bug in their code caused my little program to bring their application server to a grinding halt, preventing me and anyone from logging in. They were incredibly helpful and very responsive, fixing the problem on the spot. Zoho Creator, they explained, was a work in progress, still young and prone to these sorts of problems. Although it looks great and does exactly what I want it to, it isn’t the robust timesaver I hoped it would be today. By my next project, I am sure it will be robust and reliable.

Remembering that ZC is currently an entirely free product, the level of assistance people receive from the development team is just amazing.

ZC Downtime Report

pthomas@parmenides:~$ HEAD creator.zoho.com
500 Can't connect to creator.zoho.com:80 (connect: Connection refused)
Content-Type: text/plain
Client-Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:08:29 GMT
Client-Warning: Internal response

And still down, last I checked….

Looks like it came back up for me after around 18 minutes…

Add a Record Hack

Update: This approach won’t work because of a new bug (I believe introduced in the Sept 1 production update) in the way ZC sendmail handles multiline text fields. See the comments to this post for more information. Thanks to Suganya, this is now fixed!

Goal:

Programmatically add a new record to a Zoho Creator application.

Ideas:

The example application asks the user to select a fruit. After the user submits the form, the selected fruit is saved. In addition, after a few moments a new record is created in the Activity Log that shows which user saved a fruit and at what time they saved it.

Blabber:

Lately there have been several requests in the Zoho Creator forum that ask for the ability to programmatically add a new record. Although the feature is not currently supported in Deluge (the ZC team reports that it’s on the way), by using sendmail() you can still get it done provided your application is in no hurry to see that new record written to the corresponding form.

The example application pretty much demonstrates all you need to know. If you look at the Deluge source you can see that the first form is simply calling sendmail() in its on success {} block to write a new record to the second form using that second form’s More Actions >> Import Data >> By Email functionality. It’s a pretty mundane demonstration and is designed to write a new record to a form within the same application but in July I wrote about this technique in more detail and demonstrated how you can use it to effectively send information from one or more applications to a separate application.

The major drawback with this technique (other than it being a shameful hack) is that of course there is a sometimes not-so-brief delay between the time your application sends its emailed record to import and that record actually showing up in the database. If you can deal with the drawback though, other possibilities open up — for instance how about an application or applications that present the form interfaces in several different languages but save all that form data to a single view (along with a field indicating which language was used, for filtering purposes)? That way you could support multilingual applications that all write to the same place for easier data processing, management, etc.

Related Links:

Talking to Zoho Creator with Email

ZC Weirdness (potential bugs in the system):

None! Unfortunately it sometimes takes awhile for the emailed record to actually show up, but that’s just the nature of the beast.

LoZC App Access: August 01-31 2007

(1 visit = Loading any form in the application)

An outstanding bug with Zoho Creator prevented adding Seattle Coffee Shops to the list. Once that bug is fixed I’ll start drawing statistics on that application as well. is now added to the logging application and will be included in next month’s stats.