Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Embedding an HTML Form

One of the technologies we're going to be leveraging on this project is HTML Form Entry. It's a great tool, since as long as you can write HTML, it lets you quickly define forms that look exactly like you want them to, and behave consistently.

Two other great features are that it lets you build forms that refer to concepts via mappings to other terminologies, and it lets you import and export your forms via the Metadata Sharing module. Together, these features will let us collaborate remotely on developing forms against the MVP/CIEL dictionary, and also push those forms out to production without having to mess around with sql dumps. XForms and Infopath, you need to catch up :-)

Anyway, I just took the first step towards embedding an HTML Form in the new UI Framework, by creating a fragment that lets you display a filled-out HTML Form in a div. The code is here.

I apologize for my recent updates being so text-heavy (but I've been working on back-end functionality), but for a change of pace, here's what it looks like. (Yes, the form itself is not pretty. I spent exactly 0 seconds on making it look good.)

Viewing an HTML Form in a popup
The next step is to do a fragment that lets you enter forms.

By the way, I wrote the first version of the HTML Form Entry years ago alone in a very focused burst of coding. So it was pretty cool to peek today at the last few versions of the module (1.9.0-1.9.3) and see that those cover 53 fixed tickets, by 10 different people. I only did 7 of the tickets.

Thanks to Mark Goodrich for taking over the module from me. And thanks also to Cordt Byrne, Daniel Kayiwa, Dave Thomas, Ishara Premadasa, Rafal Korytkowski, Stephen Lorenz, and Wyclif Luyima for the recent ticket fixes.

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