[Zope-dev] Re: ZFormulator review...

[Martijn Faassen]

Chris McDonough wrote:
[snip]
> One thing that I'm sort of on the fence about is calling
> MessageDialog when properties for objects are changed.  

I'll dig through the source for DTML Method to find out what it does
there, and
I'll try using that instead.

[snip]

> - I don't really want to get too deep into reviewing code here, so I'm
> just going to report errors and things that I think are a tiny bit askew
> (:-))... within a ZFormulator form, when adding a *second* instance of
> the same type of object (for example, a second TextareaField), I
> intermittently got an AttributeError, "None" object has no attributes
> coming from Field.py line 138 in _setSheet.

Okay, I haven't been able to reproduce this one yet. If anyone
encounters this, please report it to me. Perhaps I 'accidentally' fixed
it in the to-be-released-today ZFormulator 0.2?

> Martijn, I would also give
> a little blurb as to what "Order" means within the Form elements add and
> edit UI as its not immediately obvious (I figured it out by reading the
> code).

Okay, I put a blurb on top of the edit screen explaining 'order' and
'title' (both are common to all fields).

> The View button between form elements produces inconsistent
> results (for example, a checkbox returns quoted HTML of the form
> element, while a textarea View shows the default value for the form
> element without any HTML).

I've taken the 'view' tab out; the 'test' tab should be sufficient. If
anyone complains I'll listen. :)

> Also, the ListField input box for the list
> elements should probably be split into separate key/value fields instead
> of using the pipe as a separator between key and value within a
> textarea. 

I'll probably continue to use the pipe for now.

> I know SQL integration is a "work in progress", and doesn't
> actually do much yet.  I'd almost be apt to leave it out of the product
> entirely as it's sort of hurts my brain to think about where my form
> values are coming from and going to in the context of using the product
> as a SQL conduit.

I'm leaving it in for now, unchanged; Ross Lazarus is working on more
SQL integration for ZFormulator and I'm waiting for his feedback before
I tackle SQL integration again myself. We've been doing some thinking
about this.

> Also, when navigating with the back-forward buttons
> within a browser between forms created using ZFormulator (even within
> the ZFormulator UI which "eats its own dogfood"), browser errors
> indicating that form responses have expired are common.  I imagine this
> is a pretty tough one to avoid, and I haven't looked at the code closely
> enough to see why it happens with ZFormulator forms more often than with
> Zope HTMLFile-derived forms.

Which browser do you use? These browser errors are very rare for me with
Netscape 4.7 on Linux. When using Internet Explorer 5 though I've
noticed this kind of error quite a bit in Zope. Anyone know more about
this issue?

Regards,

Martijn