Frustrated with forms still....

[pconkie]

I welcome the recent updates to the form builder, form widget and data-viewer widget.

But every time I sit down with a member of staff who want's to use frog forms to make some element of their job easier, the conversation always ends up turning towards office365 or google.

As an example - this was the last conversation.

We have ePortfolios set up for each Pupil Premium student (student no access, parent no access, staff contribute access)..  One of the pages on the ePortfolio contains their attendance information and a notice board widget used for a termly review.  Issues: each notice board is separate and there is no way to easily collect all the reviews up each term. As a new notice is essentially just one text field, we get a lot of inconsistency in what is written for the review.  

Ideally forms would come to the rescue

So we sat down and designed a new form to replace the noticeboard.  No issue here.  Placed this on a site and used the embed page widget to link in to all the ePortfolios. The fact that the form is nested means the reviews will be centralised now, so this was a big tick, as was the ability to upload the minutes of meetings.  But you can not currently filter a data-viewer widget to pick up  submission relating to the user for whom the ePortfolio was created. (it's doesn't seem possible to say: add the username from the ePortfolio title to a hidden input on the form so that it is included in the submission and then do a custom filter on the data-viewer based on this field).  

Would also be nice if: 

• The data-viewer widget had a preference to hide the first three columns
• The data-viewer widget had a preference to hide the filter controls
• The data-viewer widget had a 'detail' view - perhaps render the populated form with paging controls?
• You could write code for the form submission and reset events

So close. Would be great if any of this is in the road-map.

[Graham Quince]

Hi Paul

I've been having chats with @Matt - some of these are indeed on the roadmap.

• Are you sure the data-viewer doesn't have the filters visible?  It's a checkbox in the preferences and you can even set them prefiltered.
• Choosing which columns to display is high on the list
• The User Picker field probably helps with the filtering to a user i imagine.

Happy to have a chat with you about these features too - i might have the wrong end of the stick and it would be godo to see it in action.

[pconkie]

3 hours ago, Graham Quince said:

Hi Paul

I've been having chats with @Matt - some of these are indeed on the roadmap.

• Are you sure the data-viewer doesn't have the filters visible?  It's a checkbox in the preferences and you can even set them prefiltered.
• Choosing which columns to display is high on the list
• The User Picker field probably helps with the filtering to a user i imagine.

Happy to have a chat with you about these features too - i might have the wrong end of the stick and it would be godo to see it in action.

Sorry if I was not clear...

It would be good to have an option to hide all the filter.

You can not set them pre-filtered to the "owner" of the e-portfolio (showing logged in users data only is useless in the ePortfolio context).

"The User Picker field probably helps with the filtering to a user i imagine." But if I already have the user (because we are viewing their ePortfolio right now!) then why not make that field invisible and pre-fill it?

[Graham Quince]

47 minutes ago, pconkie said:

Sorry if I was not clear...

It would be good to have an option to hide all the filter.

You can not set them pre-filtered to the "owner" of the e-portfolio (showing logged in users data only is useless in the ePortfolio context).

"The User Picker field probably helps with the filtering to a user i imagine." But if I already have the user (because we are viewing their ePortfolio right now!) then why not make that field invisible and pre-fill it?

Right, yeah - I read the filtering bit the wrong way round.  I think i understand now and that would be really powerful.   I can't promise anything and have to be deliberately vague here, but there is a series of conversations happening at the moment around addressing this sort of thing along with being able to do a lot more with forms - beyond the stuff I've mentioned already.

(I know you know) It's possible to use the Forms API and the HTML widget to extract the sort of information you're after and I beleive I understand your frustration that you have to use HTML to get this information out in the way you want - well, that's at the heart of these conversations.

Sorry to sound cagey, but I'm trying not to get anyone's hopes raised, in case it all comes crashing down.

Having said all the above - there's nothing on the cards around pre-filling form fields - I know it's a popular one.  @adamw - as you know more about forms than me - would pre-filled in fields (including dynamic info such as a site's title) be simple or incredibly hard?

 

 

[ADT]

18 minutes ago, Graham Quince said:

Right, yeah - I read the filtering bit the wrong way round.  I think i understand now and that would be really powerful.   I can't promise anything and have to be deliberately vague here, but there is a series of conversations happening at the moment around addressing this sort of thing along with being able to do a lot more with forms - beyond the stuff I've mentioned already.

(I know you know) It's possible to use the Forms API and the HTML widget to extract the sort of information you're after and I beleive I understand your frustration that you have to use HTML to get this information out in the way you want - well, that's at the heart of these conversations.

Sorry to sound cagey, but I'm trying not to get anyone's hopes raised, in case it all comes crashing down.

Having said all the above - there's nothing on the cards around pre-filling form fields - I know it's a popular one.  @adamw - as you know more about forms than me - would pre-filled in fields (including dynamic info such as a site's title) be simple or incredibly hard?

 

 

 

[adamw]

2 minutes ago, Graham Quince said:

Having said all the above - there's nothing on the cards around pre-filling form fields - I know it's a popular one.  @adamw - as you know more about forms than me - would pre-filled in fields (including dynamic info such as a site's title) be simple or incredibly hard?

Probably somewhere in between those options. These would all have to be options that are added to the form widget, so we don't change the behaviour of existing forms. Also, adding options to filter data-viewer to the user who's eportfolio (or indeed any site that is shared to another user) is probably the hardest part. 

I don't know a great deal about how an e-portfolio is assigned to the user from a data point of view, so we'd need to look into that.