New options to to forms

[Leonardo Costa]

Recently i was thinking in some new features to foms that could be great in my opinion. Looking my needs and some good examples on net i thought  SF could add:
I would like SF have an option to be able to have dropdown menu list in fields we choose. The data in dropdown menu will be from attribute or relation data. Example: I add a new dropdown menu called: 
Country. 
All data in dropdown menu will come from articles that have attribute Country. If i created an article and added [[Country:=Brazil]] so Brazil will appear in country dropdown menu. 
* All Dropdown fields will be inactive until i add data in the first one in the form. So if i don't choose no data in country fields, i can't choose data in city field.
* If i choose Brazil in city field, the next dropdown menu will be active being possible to choose a city. The way SF will know and
show the cities in field city will be by articles that have the 2 attributes or relations: Country and City.
* Will be possible to choose more than 1 instance in dropdown menus. This will be possible by: after you add a data in dropdown menu, will have an option to choose another instance in the same dropdown menu, Something with ajax.
* Will be possible to add data in dropdown menu, but the data will be saved only if you create the article. So next time you add data in a form you will see the data in the field you added before.
*When Yaron added the option to add more than 1 instance per field adding comma, i think he could add this option in form window like this example i 
saw on net where you can add more instances clicking on + button. Example: http://www.zapatec.com/website/main/products/forms/demo.jsp#multiple.html
So will not be necessary add something like this: http://busytonight.com/w/index.php?title=Special:AddData&form=Event


 

[rich...@gmail.com]

I'm the author of the busytonight.com form referenced in Leo's
message. I'd probably use the functionality that Leo suggests, or
similar functionality, if it were available. In particular: I want to
be able to use the value in one field to limit the autocomplete
results in another. For example (simplified):

* I have fields called "City", "State", and "Company".
* In the "Company" field, I want the available autocomplete values to
include only those "Companies" that are located in the "City" and
"State" that have already been filled in (or chosen from a dropdown)
by the user in the form.
* This assumes that "City" and "State" semantic relations (or
categories) preexist for every "Company."

--Rich

> saw on net where you can add more instances clicking on + button. Example:http://www.zapatec.com/website/main/products/forms/demo.jsp#multiple....

[Yaron Koren]

There are a lot of ideas here... let's see if we can split them up:

1. Having autocompletes for fields dependent on the value of previous
fields - this is not a bad idea, and in fact Discourse DB does just
such a thing, in the Add Item page (http://discoursedb.org/
add_item.php), for the Topic and Position fields - that form, however,
was programmed separately, and not implemented using Semantic Forms,
and the way it was done is kind of a hack. To do it the real way, I
think you'd have to have Javascript real-time querying and loading of
data from the database, and that kind of stuff is beyond my current
level of knowledge about Javascript/AJAX.

If I can digress, it's features like this that are part of the reason
I keep pushing for adding support for n-ary relations in Semantic
MediaWiki - it's a lot easier to handle values that are related to one
another if they're defined as being related to one another. If you
don't know what I'm talking about, see this page -
http://ontoworld.org/wiki/N-ary_relations - and its corresponding talk
page.

2. Being able to select more than one value in dropdown menus - I
don't see any real value in this.

3. A Javascript implementation of adding/removing multiple fields -
this is great, and I had been looking for something just like this.
Hopefully there's a way to easily copy the Javascript over to the
Semantic Forms code - anyone want to take a look at it? :)

-Yaron

[Sergey Chernyshev]

Just a suggestion, it might be a good idea to read up on forms functionality in some large CMSs like Interwoven TeamSite, for example - they've been through feature selection and flexibility building process long ago and could be useful in understanding how to make a good Forms product.

My experience with TeamSite tells me that there is no functionality that will serve everybody and it might be a better idea to create APIs for developers to use (Ajax calls to server to populate forms, for example) instead of building all variety into the core.

Sorry for not being very constructive ;)

             Sergey

On 6/15/07, Yaron Koren <yar...@gmail.com > wrote:

There are a lot of ideas here... let's see if we can split them up:

1. Having autocompletes for fields dependent on the value of previous
fields - this is not a bad idea, and in fact Discourse DB does just

such a thing, in the Add Item page ( http://discoursedb.org/

[Yaron Koren]

Two more thoughts:

- I think a discussion of creating an API is very premature - for one
thing, I don't believe there's been any issue yet on which there's
been a serious disagreement over how to proceed. If someone wants to
add a capability, it might as well get added to the general code base.

- I looked more at that "Zapatec" Ajax example, and unfortunately it
turns out that it uses a library (Zapatec) that requires purchase. But
it's a good proof-of-concept of what an Ajax-based interface would
look like. I've been reading up on Ajax, and I don't think it'll be as
hard as I thought it was, using the Prototype library (which is
already in the code base) to add in this kind of functionality.

-Yaron