SSLick Feature Addition, Much Anticipated

After many desperate, impassioned complaints, I see on the ZC blog that there is now SSL Support in Zoho Creator.

Yep, more proof of Zoho’s remarkable commitment to and support of the customers.

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.

Zynd in the Clowns

Awhile back someone in the Zoho Creator forum asked how to best design a ZC application and I wrote back to the effect that since there isn’t much design involved, it’s best just to suffer through the documentation and play with the interface until you get something close to what you thought you wanted. I’ll now amend that sentiment slightly by stating that it can’t hurt at least to try and write Deluge code that does not induce nausea.

Version 0.01 of Zyndafeed used a kludgy series of shows and hides in conjunction with 50 statically defined form fields to support up to 50 photo uploads. This worked OK from the outside but the implementation is embarrassing and in any case prompting the user with the option to fill out up to 50 text fields on one page is probably ridiculous in the first place.

Version 0.02 takes a different approach (and reduces signficantly the size of our Deluge script) by providing a separate form devoted to image uploads. A one-listing-to-many-photos relationship is established by inserting a listing’s unique_id as a non-unique identifier for rows in the Photos table. When it comes time to generate the feed, any image in the Photos table with a listing id that matches a listing’s unique id gets appended as a a child node. With this change not only are we providing Ted and the BuggyRocket customers with more flexibility (remember that we need to support at least 25 uploads per listing) but we’re also adhering closer to the DRY principle.

Design considerations when hacking out a Zoho application? It can’t hurt. In any case we’ll see what Mark thinks of this new version when he gets a chance to try it out and reply. Some ideas for more features include a monolithic view of listing data instead of views spread over 5 separate screens and some useful filters on whatever views are in place.

Zyndafeed Prototype

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.

“Iraqi Wildlife Observation”

Amazing what shows up in Zoho Creator’s public applications list sometimes.

I’m not sure how long it will stay out there but a ZC user, jtrouern, is hosting an application that seems to track wildlife sightings in Iraq.

Accessing it now I only see one entry in the database but it’s a good glimpse of ZC’s localization capabilities since the app appears in both Arabic and English versions:

Male bird hit helicopter traveling north to Balad Airbase, breaking a window. Dead bird found inside aircraft upon landing.