Lookin’ pretty good! The new search feature is working well; the printer-friendly and Excel download options are now properly reflecting the search results, sort order and selected rows. Plus the search by date function seems to be working well… Just a few things to tidy up, then after a good QA I’ll release it in private Beta in the next little while.

Here’s a snapshot of the new search option. Note the Gmail-esque button saying “All 16 rows selected”. This rather nice feature lets you select everything in a result set, to export, view or delete the rows in a few buttons clicks rather than the previous, agonizing, delete submissions one page at a time. (Oof).

Awesome. Ted Kennedy wigs out at the GOP for continually stalling the vote on increasing the minimum wage, by adding amendment after amendment.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SicFn8rqPPE

Good man.

Rather than re-write this old post, I figure I’ll save time and just edit the changes. 1.4.4 is coming along well. See the updated list of features below.
If you don’t already know, over the last few months I’ve been devoting my scraps of spare time to working on some translation management software in preparation for the language pack version of Form Tools. It’s coming along quite well, but there’s still a heck of a lot left to do.

In the meantime, I’ll continue making incremental improvements to the software. Here’s top of the list for 1.4.4:

• Submission searching. This is a badly needed feature. Basically it would provide a simple search box at the top of the submission listing pages (client & admin) which would allow you to search your custom form fields (or ALL fields) for a particular string. It would also provide an option to sort by date (e.g. last month, last week or August 2006). This would solve an old problem that’s been around since the dawn of time: slow servers taking too long to generate the excel document and timing out. Now you could download content month-by-month, for example.
• Improvements to the printer-friendly and excel download pages. Right now, if you sort by a particular field, neither the printer-friendly nor excel download reflects that: it always sorts by the default sort order. This was never very good – and with the introduction of submission searching it’s time to improve it. It will now (a) sort by whatever field you currently chose and (b) show the results from the search only (or allow a subset).
• Now logs you into the Forms page instead of the Clients page.
• Forms page now lists the number of submissions made by each form for easy reference once you first log in (admin and clients).
• All searches for each form are cached for the duration of your Form Tools session (so when you flip between pages, you don’t lose your original search).
• A new “select all X submissions” option which works very much like Gmail. When you click “select all”, it continues to select all submissions visible on that particular page (e.g. page 2), but in addition , there’s a new option that appears of being able to “select all X submissions” (where X is the number of submissions in the current search result set).

I thought I’d introduce this last feature since it’s so closely tied to the new search functionality. In the past I’ve noticed people have been cranking up the # submissions per page setting in order to get a larger number of submissions from which to select a subset to download / print. This will solve this problem in a (hopefully) simple, intuitive manner. Just as importantly, it lets you delete all submissions in a form with a mere three button clicks.

I’m also going to begin investigating the viability of a third layer of user accounts: users. This would optionally create “accounts” for people who submit a form, letting them log in and change their submissions. This has been requested by a number of people in the forums, but I’ve put it off because I knew it would raise a whole wealth of issues. This won’t be in 1.4.4 – it’s too much work right now. I think I may well defer it until 2.0.

I’m taking a sick day today. Thought I’d spare my co-workers from catching whatever it is that I have. So I figured I may as well do something productive in between popping COLD-FX capsules, chugging NeoCitron and lapping up Lipton’s soup.

This version of Form Tools was a long time in coming. Many thanks to Bryn, Ron, Khanh and Mark who helped identify a few of the bugs in the Beta.

You can download it from the Form Tools site.

Google provides some default reddish icons for their Google Maps app, but no other colours besides those. This proved to be rather a nuisance, since a client requested precisely this for their site (Probono Maps).

So… 260 images manually created later, I’m done. What a PAIN! So for anyone else needing this, click here to download the files. The zipfile contains all A-Z .png’s in the 10 colours seen below, as well as a .psd if you need to change them from A-Z to 1-100 or whatever. Hope it comes in useful!

Here are three functions sadly missing from javascript's core code. They're simple string trimming functions, mocking the functionality of the PHP functions with the same name: trim, rtrim (right trim) and ltrim (left trim). They're easy and unobstrusive to include in any script and can really come in handy... I keep forgetting to post the suckers.

Note: be sure to include all three in your code. The trim() function requires the other two to work.

Example usage: