PHP5 Forms with AJAX submit – best practices

Forms are the foundation of interactive web and what we call Web 2.0. In this article I will walk through the possible problems web developers encounter when creating web forms and solutions to those problems.

This article will be useful to people who are starting web development or who are experienced at it.

This article refers to Form implementation in Agile Toolkit. For documentation and demonstrations of forms in Agile Toolkit see http://agiletoolkit.org/doc/form

Read more

Simple Feedback Form with Agile Toolkit

My company produces around 10-20 web projects per year for small companies and web entrepreneurs. Our clients, often business-oriented, are busy chasing investors and winning awards, while we are looking after their Web Software. However interacting with them is very important and we are looking for a better ways to do so.

Since we are developing web-software, why not use that web-software to interact with the client? In this article I am explaining how to go through a steps to develop a simple yet robust feedback system.

Read More

Change proposal for Form Submission

Agile Toolkit’s Form implementation comes a long way from probably 2006. There were some changes along the way and currently we are looking to implement a new default way of form submission. Please provide your feedback.

Read more

Selective view rendering in Web Applications

Today – any desktop software is able to re-draw itself from a callback by operating system. However many Web Frameworks today do not keep track of objects and cannot selectively produce pieces of HTML code.

I believe that ability to have control over objects on HTML pages is very essential to have in the Framework. Here is why:

Read more

3.9.1 Released

Release of 3.9.1 brings us many bugfixes and enhancements. Grid is cleaned up but forms are also slightly changed.

Read more

Upcoming release 3.9.1

There are number of stability improvements and code clean ups happening in trunk. We are getting ready to release minor update for our stable branch 3.9. Some of the features:

• Ajax Form inline errors are back and working properly
• Grids are going to be married with atk4_grid and will support row reloading and other things
• Grid Inline editing is back!
• Improved compatibility with older projects
• … and more.

Tell me what would you like to see in upcoming release? Oh and meanwhile, we did our first public demonstration of Agile Toolkit 4:

http://files.agiletech.ie/atk-present.mov

We plan to wind-up our promotion as we are nearing closer to 4.0 release.

Form and enter..

I have came across old code in the Form and Field implementation and it’s basically implementing form submit when enter is clicked. I was thinking about what would be the right behavior. Therefore I am calling to your opinion here.

Read more

Ordering elements

In Agile Toolkit each object you add is inserted as a child to some other object. They end up in $object->elements array, however there is no easy way to rearrange it.

Read more

How to select elements in a grid?

Let’s say you want user to be able and select multiple elements in a grid. This can’t be done directly, because grid is supposed to list elements, it shouldn’t be built to intact with it. However grid can be extended and joined with the functionality of the Form to do what’s required.

You can see a working example here: http://atk4.agiletech.ie/grid/selectable.html

Read more

Future addButton() syntax – I need your suggestions

I’d like to hear your opinion about some suggestions towards button implementation

Currently there are 2 versions running around:

1) $form->addButton()->redirect(‘/’)  - in this one form’s addButton is returning $js(‘click’)->univ() of the button. This is backward compatible version and seriously, why would we need to do anything with button but redirect.

2) $form->addButton()->js(‘click’)->univ()->redirect(‘/’) – here addButton returns “View_Button” object. The benefit is that you can do certain things with is such as addLabel or setStyle(), which will affect how button looks. Also instead of just clicks you can use other events, such as mouse-over etc. This is more standard-compliant version IMHO

Read more