ColdFusion Builder Extension: Form Builder

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• #1 by Brian Meloche on 12/2/09 - 11:03 PM

  

  Cool... I could have used that LAST week! :-) I've been experimenting with something similar myself, using both rolling my own with Illudium and my own templates, as well as something entirely custom using cfdbinfo, even to the point where I could generate the form AND use it as a live form... Something I need to blog about... which I've added to my long list of things to blog about.
  
  On your extension, it's a nice start. I would have used it for some work I am doing if I'd like to see something that would see is if it can detect if there are any primary and foreign keys, and especially for foreign keys, generate selects (single or multiple) and radio fields, which could come back in query, array of structures or array of objects based on the relationship. The jQuery idea is also a good one, as well as any other JS framework or custom JS. I look forward to playing with it.

• #2 by Brian Meloche on 12/2/09 - 11:20 PM

  

  Eck... not sure what happened to my comment... I'll repost that second paragraph, but it was supposed to be a three paragraphed comment, not two. I'll post it as intended. I'll also add to it...
  
  On your extension, it's a nice start. I would have used it for some work I am doing if it had been available. It does have potential, and I'd like to see what the templates look like. I've built some templates for LightFront that do something similar to this, as well as built controllers and services. It's not quite ready for the masses, though.
  
  For what I would like to see going into it would be something that would detect if there are any primary and foreign keys, and especially for foreign keys, generate selects (single or multiple) and radio fields, which could come back in query, array of structures or array of objects based on the relationship and you'd generate all of that in a nice little package (I've made a snippet for that, but a snippet can't obviously read the database).
  
  Also, I didn't see it, but I'll ask: Can you add extra
  
  The jQuery idea is also a good one, as well as any other JS framework or custom JS. I look forward to playing with it.
  
  Of course, the extension could be carried forward to build validation routines, inserts/updates into the database, and the controller and service CFCs. It could also tie into a form library, such as CFUniform or what have you and write out those libraries if they aren't in your application.
  
  All in all, very promising... you could probably release that as is and get more feedback that way! Let me know when you do!

• #3 by Brian Meloche on 12/2/09 - 11:23 PM

  

  Eck, part 2!!!
  
  What that short paragraph was supposed to say...
  
  I didn't see it, but I'll ask: Can you add extra form fields? It didn't appear so, but that would be my #1, even ahead of the table relationships... since that should be fairly easy to add.

• #4 by Dan Vega on 12/2/09 - 11:24 PM

  

  We could easily do something with the primary key. Each column passes the following info.
  
  cfsqltype CF_SQL_INTEGER
  cftype numeric
  javatype 4
  length 10
  name id
  nullallowed false
  primarykey true
  type int identity

• #5 by Brian Swartzfager on 12/3/09 - 6:58 AM

  

  Glad to see someone's taking on the idea of building forms using a Builder extension. I gave the idea some thought when Builder extensions were first announced, but eventually decided to go a different direction (semi-configurable CRUD code generation).
  
  I like what you've got so far. One of the challenges I saw in doing something like this was providing the configuration options for each form field. You've already provided a means to configure the type of form control and the text of the label, but if you add Javascript/jQuery validation to the mix, do you think you'll add the ability to add custom validation messages for each validation error condition on each form field, or just generate generic validation messages (like "This field is required" or "This field cannot be longer than 100 characters")?
  
  Good luck with this: interested to see how it'll turn out.

• #6 by John Allen on 12/3/09 - 9:14 AM

  

  This is great. A form builder for CFBuilder has been on my TODO list for a month.
  
  I've prototyped a little but have been thinking about how to generically do the relationship stuff. My thoughts were to take whats being built for ModelGlue.

• #7 by Rick Mason on 12/3/09 - 12:01 PM

  

  Dan,
  
  Impressive beginning, I agree you should post it so that you can get detailed feedback.
  
  Second the idea of jquery validation. But it would be nice to go even further and support posting using cfajaxproxy complete with validation message.

• #8 by Wim on 12/4/09 - 1:28 AM

  

  Cool!

• #9 by Dave Burns on 4/19/11 - 10:56 AM

  

  Dan - Did you ever post this code anywhere? I didn't see it on riaforge. Even if you don't think it's complete, it seemed like a timesaver as-is and I could run with it. Please let us know.
  
  db