Land of the Lost

I could go into a tortured explanation for what knocked us off-line for several days but why waste time telling sad stories? The important thing is that we’re back. Also, I updated the re<form>ation Wufoo wrapper for Zoho Creator and hope to add support for the Dabble DB format soon. Here are some improvements over what I last described:

• New option to generate and copy/paste static source code for any form configuration
• New option to choose the calendar theme
• New option to specify success message upon successful form save
• Simplified configuration form
• Fixed most IE CSS problems
• Added dynamic generation of title element text based on the Zoho form label

Here are a couple new examples.

Issue with Comments Fixed

Apologies for comments at LoZC being buggered up the past few days. The admin email alias hosted at GoDaddy was temporarily failing, preventing new comments from being brought to the admin’s attention, sending them to a black hole of sorts. I think it’s fixed now and the recent comments are now live on the site.

Wufoo Themes Revisited

OK our wufoo-ifier is in a little better shape now. Improvements include:

• Theme preview — updates the Wufoo theme each time you select a new one from the dropdown
• Logo switcher — offers several icons to replace the “Wufoo” logo in the upper left hand corner.
• Multiple calendars — supports many date or date/time pop-up calendars on the same form
• Improved style for required fields — asterisks denoting Required fields now better match Wufoo’s style (still broken in Explorer)
• Better support for IE, Safari, and Opera

Just as an aside, I needed a way to dynamically generate a callback to Calendar.setup in a way that most browsers would support and AppJet came to the rescue in about 10 lines of code:

/* appjet:version 0.1 */
/* apject:server */
var qs = request.params;
response.setHeader('Content-type', 'text/javascript');
page.setMode("plain");
print(raw(
"""Calendar.setup({inputField : """ +
"\"" + qs.inputId + "\"" +
""", ifFormat : """ +
"\"" + qs.formatString + "\"" +
""", showsTime : true, button : """ +
"\"" + qs.buttonId + "\"" +
""", singleClick : true, step : 1});"""
));

Generating a callback with client-side JavaScript can go something like this:

//...
var queryString = '?inputId=' + escape(inputId) +
'&formatString=' + escape(formatString) +
'&buttonId=' + escape(buttonId) +
'&noCacheIE=' + escape(noCacheIE);
calScript.id = 'calendar-setup-' + jsonIds++;
calScript.src = 'http://calset.appjet.net/' + queryString;
calScript.type = 'text/javascript';
calScript.charset = 'utf-8';
// etc., etc..

No fuss, no muss. More on the woofuifier later.

Wufoo Themes meet Zoho Creator Forms

ZC2WF can render most Zoho Creator forms using any of Wufoo’s 50 CSS themes. Here are a few examples using some forms from Zoho Creator’s Sample Applications:

• post profile Modern Office theme, redirects to itself
• New Recipient Firenze theme, redirects to itself
• Add Donations Pistachio theme, redirects to itself
• Add New Donor Garden Pool theme, redirects to a Red Cross page

I say “most” forms because the service uses a modified version of Zoho Creator’s JavaScript Client API which means it won’t render any File Upload fields (since the Client API itself does not support these) and any client-side Deluge scripting (including the hiding and showing of fields) set up within the “native” ZC form won’t be available in this skinned version of the form.

Another current limitation is that although Wufoo themes have great support for instructions per-field to help the user, Zoho Creator doesn’t include its instructions for the user in the JSON export of its form definitions. If the ZC team can add this info to the export, I’ll happily add it to the service.

Here’s a zip archive of the relevant files, they can be hosted anywhere without too much hassle. Feel free to experiment with your own forms and I’ll post here as more features become available.

Update: I notice the calendar pop-ups aren’t working in Safari and Opera. I’ll fix that soon…