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.
The submission search option will make another great addition. More convenient than using Toad MySQL or EMS MySQL Lite.
Logging into the Forms page makes more sense since one is less likely to create new clients than new forms or edit forms.
Thank you, Ben.