San Quentin, I hate every inch of you!
I have wasted the better part of a day dealing with idiotic issues with eForm. I write these comments in the hope that someone will take an interest and fix up the code to make it usable for people who don’t want to spend their time reading the source.
First and foremost - documentation - the old joke that it was difficult to write, it should be difficult to use was not meant as universal guidance. eForm needs proper documentation, Susan’s recent tutorial is a good start but it includes the parser which makes it difficult to use in conjunction with older material.The source code comments and error messages need bringing up to date and the useful stuff from this forum needs to be in the main body of the documentation.
Specific problems I encountered, &formid is now mandatory, if you omit it then you get the benefit of this piece of code
if ($formid=="") return "Invalid Form Id number or name.";If you can’t see what is wrong with this then you have no business producing software for use by other people. The code that follows could indicate if an invalid formid was provided but doesn’t
&format is now mandatory unless you want to use the parser, if you don’t provide it and omit parser placeholders you get a baffling runtime error as contained in this post http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,2122.msg48299.html#msg48299
Finally and most importantly, practically every example of eform usage is incorrect, they all show the [[eForm? ]] (non-cacheing) usage when most times, especially if you use validation, you must use the cacheing form [!eForm? !] This should be lit up in neon at the start of the documentation
The problem I had is that until I got all 3 right I could get no insight into what was wrong with my code. eForm also badly needs a debug mode.
Ed
Seems like a lot of people (including me) have been able to make eForm work with the documentation provided. It actually seemed rather "plug-and-play" to me, and I’ve now plugged it into six or seven forms of varying length and complication. Did you read the messages in this thread as part of the necessary documentation, or did you just download and install and try to go it alone?
More and better documentation is always a good thing, and there are improvements to the code (which is a work-in-progress) that would be worthwhile, but the way this community operates is by collective participation, and bad vibes and nasty mojo are no help to that process or the general goal of building useful things.
Now I’m going to re-read your comments and try to separate the helpful suggestions from the unhelpful tone...
Ed: As a general rule, starting any comment with a sentence including the word "hate" is likely to be seen as aggressive. And don’t expect everyone to get the reference to Johnny Cash’s blind rage.
Ed: As a general rule, starting any comment with a sentence including the word "hate" is likely to be seen as aggressive. And don’t expect everyone to get the reference to Johnny Cash’s blind rage.
I happen to broadly agree with your points, but if you can’t see what’s wrong with the way you phrased the comment, you shouldn’t be offering criticism.
It’s not clear, are you talking about 1.3 or not?
This discussion is closed to further replies. Keep calm and carry on.