Mar 19th, 2015, 9:05 AM
Although rather new in the Formtools world, I'd like to put forward some suggestions. These are based on our brief experience with this - altogether great - tool, which we have used to develop (in surprisingly little time!) and populate with data a simple but rather long form (about 110 fields).
1. Something that is confusing at the beginning, is the behaviour of the "Add" and "Update" buttons in the native form builder forms. Most people assume that by pressing "Add" their record is saved and a new record is opened, whereas only the latter seems to be true. Thus, I would propose that "Add" should save the current entry before moving onto a new one.
2. Similarly to the previous point, the behaviour of the form builder tabbed forms is counter-intuitive. Clicking on another tab erases the data entered on the previous one, unless "Update" was pressed. I would propose that opening a new tab shouldbe equivalent to pressing "Update" before opening the new tab.
3. The capacity to save a form partially filled in, even if it has validation errors, to be finalised at a later stage, would be welcome.
4. More control over mainstream validation rules in the form builder forms. E.g., validation for numeric content, validation against regular expressions, etc.
5. As others have proposed, it would be really nice if skip logic and dynamic elements could be introduced. Skip logic, common in survey questionnaires, would allow for fields to remain hidden unless a previous entry meets some criteria. Similarly, having dynamic elements would allow for, say, a dropbox to have contents (e.g., by displaying the contents of a different option list) that depend on a previous field.
6. Last but not least, having the capacity for providing in-form feedback dynamically, while filling in a form, would be great. That would allow, for instance, to notify the user that a similar entry exists before the user presses the update button.
Once more, thank you for developing a great tool, which makes really easy for us non-IT people to develop simple web-based data collection projects!
1. Something that is confusing at the beginning, is the behaviour of the "Add" and "Update" buttons in the native form builder forms. Most people assume that by pressing "Add" their record is saved and a new record is opened, whereas only the latter seems to be true. Thus, I would propose that "Add" should save the current entry before moving onto a new one.
2. Similarly to the previous point, the behaviour of the form builder tabbed forms is counter-intuitive. Clicking on another tab erases the data entered on the previous one, unless "Update" was pressed. I would propose that opening a new tab shouldbe equivalent to pressing "Update" before opening the new tab.
3. The capacity to save a form partially filled in, even if it has validation errors, to be finalised at a later stage, would be welcome.
4. More control over mainstream validation rules in the form builder forms. E.g., validation for numeric content, validation against regular expressions, etc.
5. As others have proposed, it would be really nice if skip logic and dynamic elements could be introduced. Skip logic, common in survey questionnaires, would allow for fields to remain hidden unless a previous entry meets some criteria. Similarly, having dynamic elements would allow for, say, a dropbox to have contents (e.g., by displaying the contents of a different option list) that depend on a previous field.
6. Last but not least, having the capacity for providing in-form feedback dynamically, while filling in a form, would be great. That would allow, for instance, to notify the user that a similar entry exists before the user presses the update button.
Once more, thank you for developing a great tool, which makes really easy for us non-IT people to develop simple web-based data collection projects!