Improving WebForm

Currently, the WebForm portlet it quite simple. But it was designed to be as simple as possible. Now we have chances to improve it a bit.

After the development of the expandos (thanks Ray) the task of storing data with a variable model in a database is much more simple (incredible simple, I must say). You just need to create a table and iterate over the specified fields to add columns to your table, which are further referenced by its name. This way you can create a form as complex as you want and the backend is still quite simple.

The new web form will support other new features, as the possibility to export data in the database to a file (email and files on server are still supported). For the time being data is exported in csv format, but we may consider other formats in a near future.

[Jesper W]

...and what about File Upload support?

[Alberto Montero]

Hi.

The information stored in the database is only accessible through the export function, so importing data (which I suppose it is what you mean by File Upload) will only store it the db, but no further processing will be available.

It will be interesting, however, if we decide to support some kind of processing of form fields (i.e. generating reports or allowing search throw fields).

[Jesper W]

The reason I asked is we have implemented this on our site, but it was a little bit of a hack because we did it half a year ago when the upload object was difficult to use.

Lots of people request the ability to upload a file (for example an image or something) in a form post, so if the forms are being worked on this would be a nice addition...

[Alberto Montero]

Ok, now I understand.

Having fields types other than text could be good. We can consider it.

[Sean Wright]

Might I also suggest adding a date field with a date picker? Also, having a masked field which is evaluated through a user-defined regular expression would be a neat addition and I don't think it would be that difficult to add.

Finally, how about implementing some sort of templating for multi-column formatting? (Could we even see a visual tool to place fields on the form, in the way portlets are positioned on a page?)

Thanks,

Sean

[Alberto Montero]

The date picker is a nice add-on.

And about the mask addition we are thinking about a more ambitious idea. Stay tuned.

Regarding the multi-column formatter, we had not considered it, but it is always good to get new ideas.

Alberto

[David Aaron Lucas]

How about a time date stamp field so that and admin can determine when the result was published?

[Alberto Montero]

Hi David.

It could be a good feature. And it can be extended to any portlet so you can have information about the last configuration change.

If you have experience and time to develop that it could be included in the main stream.

Alberto

[Johannes Seyfried]

heyho,

since the last entry/comment to this is pretty old: what's going on about improvement of the webform portlet?

i'm in the process of evaluating 5.2.2 and can't see any improvement.
maybe you can point me to the right informations to see any progress?

joohannes

[Thomas Kellerer]

I think a real cool enhancement would be if the user could upload his own HTML form that is then used by the portlet. This would give a lot more freedom in designing the form without the hassle to create complete portlet just to have my custom one.

[coffy_ sk]

What about redundancy of success/error messages in portlet? I use Liferay 5.1.2 and after successful sending of form or not filling out every mandatory field the user see 2 messages. One pair of messages is from portlet implementation and one is generic portlet messages: your-request-processed-successfully and you-have-entered-invalid-data.
It's not good from user experience perspective.