True Drag and Drop Form Designer!

[drew]

Hi Guys.

I've seen many projects here in the forums but I haven't heard about anyone creating a drag and drop form designer (where you can place form objects anywhere on the form).

One of the projects I'm apart of has a form designer tool which allows you to create your own forms using a simple drag and drop interface so you can create forms just the way you like them. This is part of a much larger project which you'll hear about soon.

Would anyone be interested in testing out a beta version of the form designer and would this have any use to the community?

If you're interested I encourage you to leave your email either in PM or just as a reply, we will be handing out limited beta accounts initially to test the waters so it will be a first some first serve basis.


Update:

An update to this post. We've put together a demonstration video for the public.

Available here:

http://firedb.com/movies/FormDesigner/FormDesigner.htm


This form desginer is part of a larger solution we are offering. The feature set can be found here:

http://www.firedb.com/products.php



We're very interested to talk to everyone, but particularly anyone in the Australia (Melbourne) area.

We're looking to partner up, or get into a joint venture with people, to use our offering for some projects.


Register with us here, we're keen to start talking to you all:

http://www.firedb.com/register.php


Those who've posted already let us know what you think of the demo video!

[anthony-apd]

certainly interested to look at.

[moegal]

I'm interested.

Marty

[rule3]

Cool interesting!!

[tjstuart]

Would be interested.

[Foggy]

Would be interested too...

[ry.extjs]

I'm interested.

[userofit]

I'd like to test it.

[letssurf]

I'm interested in most things ExtJs

[Eric24]

What would be different between what you are thinking about and the designer at the link below?

http://www.projectspace.nl/

[tanajura]

I'm interested too.

[jpierson]

When would it be available?

[Toad]

http://tof2k.com/ext/formbuilder/
and
http://www.projectspace.nl/

are great efforts, available for free. These are 80% there towards the way of providing a real extjs/web IDE form editor a la Visual Studio for Visual Basic .Net Form Editor.

But I'd be willing to pay good money for a form layout editor that has the following improvements:



robustness: cannot show black layout every other manipulation


more (relevant) properties: should show a greater subset of all available properties (the common or required ones) for each widget. Visual Basic shows a bunch (with default values) and to make clear which ones have been edited, shows those values in bold. The current minimalist property list is too small, and requires selection from the overwhelmingly large set of available properties in the popup.


spring layout for autosizing/automoving widgets when their container resizes. Visual Basic layout editor north-south-east-west springs (http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/Aa260644.vb6tovbdotnetfig1(en-us,VS.60).gif) allow flexible placement and sizing of dialog elements under resizing of container. Applying this functionality. Preferably in extjs but if necessary as an extension, to a class fairly high up in the hierarchy, perhaps ext.BoxComponent, would remove the need for specialized stuff like Ext:FieldAutoExpand (http://extjs.com/learn/Extension:FieldAutoExpand): every widget,field, etc. should be capable of this. I think this model is also more generic than some of the existing extjs layouts.


load/save (somehow via account/server, local g gears etc.)


all extjs widgets available for placement on forms


complex layouts, grids, prefilled with "dummy" children: easier to see what goes where, easier to delete stuff you don't want than to guess / remember what properties you need.


some sort of interface for defining drag/drop UIs: specifying dragzones, dropzones etc. Tricky but would be very useful.


and just like most UI builders, allowing an easy way (double-click on a widget in design mode ?) to override an elements event handlers (onClick, onMouseOver, onDragDrop etc.) would be awesome. I.e. if the form editor could manage code (edit, store, make executable etc.) as well as layout hierarchy.



Would love to see what you have got when it is available :) !

Robert

[bledford]

I'm very interested

[rnfbr1]

So am I

[drew]

Hi all,

An update to this post. We've put together a demonstration video for the public.

Available here:

http://www.firedb.com/movies/FormDesigner/FormDesigner.htm


This form desginer is part of a larger solution we are offering. The feature set can be found here:

http://www.firedb.com/products.php



We're very interested to talk to everyone, but particularly anyone in the Australia (Melbourne) area.

We're looking to partner up, or get into a joint venture with people, to use our offering for some projects.


Register with us here, we're keen to start talking to you all:

http://www.firedb.com/register.php


Those who've posted already let us know what you think of the demo video!

[garyk]

Video looks good, just two things;

1. You show building the form at design time but don't actually show the built form running in a browser
2. Does your designer handle nested layouts as other designers I have tried so far dont, say an accordion in a section border layout?

Gary

[abillson]

Garyk - We've put a new video on our website that shows the whole process of entity / form creation, including making a new record using the new form, and using the search engine to find the new record. This should give you a good idea on how the form acts at runtime. Keep in mind its only a very basic example, we'll get some more detailed vids out by the end of the week.

The new vids can be seen here ... http://www.firedb.com/demo.php

The form created in the designer becomes the center panel of an Ext Window, and all the controls inside it are absolutely positioned.

There is no support for border layout or accordion. This shouldnt be too hard to add. I'll give it some thought.

The formdesigner is part of a much bigger project. I'll be adding a new thread in the next couple of days to talk about the whole project in more detail.

ab

[wasp]

Stop putting useless videos, and give us the real app, even if it's paid. I don't care ( and I think nobody cares ) about the videos, if we cannot use it.

[xevin]

Very Nice.. Cool..but please, u haven't show how the Code Hooks works? Post a video plz..

[abillson]

Wasp - we're keen to get the product out as well. We have a couple weeks of cleanup to do before we can hand out any demo accounts. Until then we will be posting more videos on our website, in fact we'd still make videos and screenshots if there were demo accounts available. Some people like to watch before they try.

xevin - I'll post a vid on creating and executing a codehook later on today.

[mjhaston]

Interested!

[garyk]

whats happened with this, it seems to have stalled?

[drew]

Hi Gary.

We've been flat out with our product and haven't been as active in the forums as we'd like to be. We currently have a handful of beta users and we're planning on taking on another 100 at the end of February. We also plan to release version 1.0 by June 2009.

[garyk]

OK, good to see its still on its way!