Wufoo - Form Builder
February 26, 2006 | Comments Off
Matt has been using this interactive form builder as an example for our form builder he is writing as part of a prospective student portal we are writing for Plymouth State.
Today, I found an even cooler one called Wufoo (not Hufu) over on a sweet Chinese blog that previously linked to me. Wufoo uses a heavy union of Ajax and Flash techniques. It may be a little heavier on the Flash than I would have gone, but it is still really cool.
Tags: "form builder", "prospective student portal", AJAX, form, hufu, web 2.0, web development
Firefox Form Difficulty
November 4, 2005 | 17 Comments
I had this form that I kept getting reports about it not working. I knew the form had not changed in over a year, so was confused by the report. I fired up Internet Explorer, tested it, it worked perfect. However, the form didn’t work at all in Firefox. Looking at it, it seemed pretty simple, so what was the issue?
So, I took the form and started some known array debugging techniques, mainly a simple print_r($_POST) which showed all the array elements with proper values in IE, but with Firefox they all had the default form values. Strange.
So, I copied the form out of the overall application, dropping included functions, libraries, and global variables. Just taking the standalone form and posting it to a PHP script that only print_r()’d the $POST array. Still did it.
It then dawned on me that I should try just a simple hand coded form unrelated to this example to make sure I didn’t have a flawed Firefox install, and in turn be certain it could process forms. Of course it could, this was good. Something was wrong with my form specifically.
I then boiled the form down to be extremely simple, removing various elements one at a time until the form functioned properly, which it eventually did. I had then narrowed it down to be related to the <input type=”reset” name=”reset” value=”reset” /> button. At this point I jumped to the conclusion that maybe Firefox had messed up the reset button implementation, so made a simple form using it, and it worked fine…
Now I knew the reset was related, but not the sole cause, so what was different? For some reason, the reset and submit buttons had a <label> tag around them. I know, this doesn’t make any sense, but it also shouldn’t cause this level of difficulty.
Anyway, here’s a simplified version of a troubling form:
<form method=”post” action=”show_post.php”>
<input name=”example” type=”text” size=”40″ value=”{something default}” />
<label>
<input type=”reset” name=”reset” value=”Reset” />
<input type=”submit” name=”Submit” value=”Submit” />
</label>
</form>
Test it out here and you’ll see what I mean (hopefully).