Land of Zoho Creator

This incomplete version of Zyndafeed has some interesting characteristics, most of which aren’t particularly flattering, but at least we can fix the first two:

1. Photos in the wrong place (fix in next version)

Currently the form labeled New asks Ted how many photos he needs to upload (with a maximum of 50) and then dutifully renders only that number of upload fields for him to complete. Now that Mark has clarified the requirements to support a range beyond 25 photos, leaving them here is pretty ridiculous. In the next version we’ll break them out into their own form. We’ll also fix the 50 photo fields that are currently hindering attempts to edit the existing records in the Main view.

2. Photos published in XML feed (fix in next version)

We still need to render a new XML element for each photo before we have compliant custom XML feed. After we get #1 squared away this shouldn’t be a big deal.

3. Non-intuitive form behavior (won’t fix)

Even after we do make photos a separate part of the application, Ted may still suffer at the hands of some non-intuitive (albeit innocuous) application behavior — if he fills out a few photo fields at the bottom then later hides those fields, then submit the form, any data in those hidden image upload fields would still be sent.

4. Unfortunate code (won’t fix)

ZC’s simple back-end is sometimes a limitation. We’ve managed to commit more than a few unspeakable crimes against all that is holy in the land of law-abiding script writers:

1. The lack of dynamic field definition means that our only way of supporting up to 50 image upload fields is to statically define each field up front then show or hide the required number of fields as appropriate.
2. The lack of one-to-many relationships marches us down the ill-advised path of generating our own unique-ids.
3. Both the inability to add a new record from a script and the inability to update existing records (without also creating a new row) make our table “design” and the scripting required to maintain it unwieldy to the point where we hope we don’t have to maintain it too much. Oh well, at least part of any necessary maintenance can be done via the GUI and if it gets much more complicated we actually will check the source into Subversion.

I’ll update again when the next version is published; separate photo functionality and a complete XML feed should present something Ted could conceivably use to cover the listing entry duties of his job.

We’ll also take a look at how Zoho CRM might hook into the process Mark needs to enable.