Web Form Factory Weblog

Improved validation

After some feedback, we’ve improved the webform generation process by detecting invalid input names. Inputs names that have invalid characters (non-alphanumeric) are now flagged and the form is Not generated until these errors are corrected.

Hopefully, this should make WebFormFactory more intuitive to use.

Let us know, if you have any other suggestions for improving our generator on our Google group

WFF Tags

What are WFF Tags?
The WFF tag engine was introduced in version 0.1.3 and is quite similar to the tag engine in one of our favourite PHP Application: Textpattern. WFF tags are special HTML entities that you can place within your HTML form before you submit it to WFF for processing. Upon submission, these tags are then transformed into into something useful within the generated form.

Structure of a WFF Tag
All WFF tags must have the following stucture:

The wff: indicator ensures that the tag is recognized only by the WFF engine and that it is ignored by browsers and servers.

Purpose of WFF Tags
WFF tags are simply generic indicators that you place within your form, and which tell WFF that some special processing is required. WFF has an internal tag dictionary which lists the tags that WFF can recognize. When one of the tags in the dictionary is encountered within a form, WFF processes it and transforms it into a desired result. For example, the tag:

is transformed into PHP code which display form errors if, for instance, an incomplete form containing mandatory fields is submitted by the end-user.

Tags can also allow the elimination of repetitive, tedious jobs. For example, the WFF tag engine could be programmed to recognize the following tag:

and transform it into a drop down list containing all countries. This would save a lot of time wasted manually creating a ddlist of countries. As we add more tag to the WFF tag engine dictionary, one can easily see how WFF will become more and more powerful while keeping its original simplicity.

Tag development
For the moment, the WFF Team is responsible for expanding the tag vocabulary recognized by WFF. We however, intend, in the future to allow other developers to create their own tags and add them to the WFF Tag engine dictionary. Thus, this would allow developers to extend WFF’s functionality very easily.

Version 0.1.3 released

WFF Version 0.1.3 has been released after some testing.

The main features introduced in this version are

1. Simple form validation.
2. Tagging engine

1. Simple form validation
Simple form validation is just that. You can specify which fields
you want to make mandatory by having an associated label containing an
asterisk. (*). For example, if you have a textfield named “firstName”,
which you want to make mandatory, you simply need to have a
corresponding label within your form that looks like this:



First Name *

2. Tagging engine
The tagging is what enables WFF to currently perform validation and will help introduce more complex validation rules as well as new features in the future. WFF tags look like this:

Tags must be placed in the html form file by the form author (that’s you!) before submitting it to WFF. Each tag, of course, has a specific purpose. Currently, WFF recognizes only 1 tag:

This tag must be present in any form submitted to WFF 0.1.3+. (If not, WFF will raise an error upon generation) This tag, in particular, represents a placeholder for the location where the user wants the form validation errors to appear. For e.g: at the top of the form in red letters, or below the submit button. Upon form generation, WFF will replace this tag with the corresponding PHP code which will show any form validation errors.

Feel free to give the new WFF a try and let us know how you feel about it!

In the next few blog posts, we will cover in more details how Tagging works, its purpose as well as more info on form validation.

Currently testing Form Validation

We’re currently testing a long-awaited feature before we roll it out: Generation of form validation code. You can certainly give it a test too, if you’d like, at beta.webformfactory.com

How it works
Most of the time, whenever you have a form, there are certain input fields that you’d like to make mandatory. WFF 0.1.3 will let you easily specify which fields are mandatory within your form simply by adding an asterisk (*) within a corresponding label tag.

For example, if you have a textfield named “first_name”, then if you have a label which looks like this (notice the *) within the supplied html form:

First Name *

Then, the form generated by WFF will contain code which will make sure the form is not submitted until this particular field is filled. Of course you can make all the fields within the form mandatory by adding asterisks to each field label.

Preserving input
That’s not all. Let’s say the user partially fills in your form and forgets 1 or 2 mandatory fields. Upon submit, the user will receive a message saying that all mandatory fields haven’t been completed. The form will, however, remember and preserve the values that have been filled so that the user doesn’t have to fill them again. This works for all common inputs such as textfields, password fields, checkboxes, drop down lists and radio buttons.

Other improvements
Other improvements in 0.1.3 include better form validation upon generation. WFF will now detect if your form doesn’t have a proper submit button. This was added based on previous feedback in our Google Group

More to Come
We have some ideas on how to make automatic generation of form validation code even more useful and simple, but we can’t tell you just yet. Stay tuned for some more improvements coming up and a big thanks to everyone using WFF!

Improved Setup

The PHP Object library which lies under and powers Web Form Factory is, as mentioned on our blog, “POG” (PHP Object Generator). Recently a new version of POG was released and provides the user with a better Setup experience. Since WFF uses the latest POG version, this means that all webforms which are generated through WFF will also provide a better setup experience.

To see what the WFF Setup process is, take a look at this video

The improvements include automatic alignment of database table with a generated form. For instance, if you decide at some point to add a new field to your form, you simply need to regenerate the backend code and re-run setup. Once setup is complete, your new form is ready to collect data. There is no need to manually modify any database tables by adding or removing columns.

The easies way to experience the improvements is to generate a simple form and give it a try. You’ll see for yourself.