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.

“Modular Databases”

A user in the Zoho Creator forum named scotto recently published an intriguing example of what he refers to as modular databases for Zoho Creator:

…an app that has all the countries of the world and their regions, states, or provinces…:
http://creator.zoho.com/scotto/countries-and-states/

I have also created a sample dropdown that lists the regions according to the country selected by the user…

I used ZC’s Copy Application feature to copy scotto’s application into my own account. For those who don’t know this feature is located in the upper right corner of the main ZC screen:

At first I thought I could simply use the version I copied in any of my own apps via the Lookup interface:

But as it turns out, things aren’t so simple. All the above feature does is allow your current app to import a single column of data from one of your other apps for use as a Dropdown. If I were to do this twice, one field for Country and one for Region, I wouldn’t have access to any of the associated columns that connect the two.

For example, if my Lookup 1 imported all the countries and my Lookup 2 all the regions, there still wouldn’t be any way for me to populate Lookup 2 with the right Region data when the user selected from Lookup 1, because I don’t have access to the associating data, e.g., United States –> Alabama.

So instead I copied scotto’s application into my own account, exported its Country and Region data into CSV files on my laptop:

Then uploaded the CSV files into my copy. I modified the copy to suit my needs, in this case adding First Name and Last Name fields, to create a User Profile application.

Though truly modular applications that you could either access directly as a ZC user or copy and use “out-of-the-box” in your own account would be better, this is at least one approach to speeding up your application creation — copy an application someone else (scotto, in this case) creates and then modify it to suit your own needs.

The only big drawback I noticed in my example was that my CSV downloads did not export in alphabetical order so that, for instance, the default region for the United States is Iowa in my application, whereas it was Alabama in scotto’s original. This could be fixed with my own data massaging prior to importing it, but I wonder if there’s some way to do it within ZC itself, after import.

Thanks for the tip, scotto!