DriveWorks 8 – Form Designer Part 3

So far with forms we’ve covered transparency and the new hyperlink control, today I’d like to talk about a couple of other customer driven changes which we think are going to make working with forms in DriveWorks even better.

Form Background Color

This is a pretty small tweak but is one we get asked for pretty regularly, so here it is, custom background colors for forms:

 

Combined with picture transparency it should be possible to create some good looking forms – and some bad ones too, I reserve the right to be ill if someone sends me a form which is lime green

Form and Dialog Warnings

Form warnings are a great feature of DriveWorks, they make it easy to prevent a user from continuing when they’ve entered something that isn’t quite right, for example an invalid email address.

That said, not everyone wants to see form warnings at the bottom of the form – the way that they are shown by default in DriveWorks. So, quite often we end up putting warning images or red text on the form to guide the user down the right path, but if we do that, then the form warnings list is shown anyway.

Now, in DriveWorks 8 you can disable the form warnings list on a form by form basis.

We’ve also made it possible to turn form warnings on and off on dialogs shown by dialog buttons and item lists.

The form warnings will still be used to enable/prevent navigation on the form, but they won’t be shown so that you can take complete control over how you want them presented to the user.

More Picture Fun

In Part 2 I showed the new Hyperlink control and how it supports using pictures in addition to or instead of text, but we didn’t stop there.

Macro Buttons, Dialog Buttons, Check Boxes, and Option Groups have all had the picture treatment:

For buttons, three pictures can be set, the normal picture, the hover picture, and the “pressed” picture.

For check boxes and option groups, two pictures can be set – the deselected and the selected picture:

Hopefully these new options give you even more control over the look and feel of forms, I’m really looking forward to seeing what you produce

In the next post I’m going to take a break from forms to talk about some more rules enhancements in DriveWorks – stay tuned, there’s some really cool stuff coming

Comments

[Paul Gimbel]

We see the checkboxes and buttons, but how do option groups work? Are you replacing the dot with an image, or can you put images for each of the options? For example, we have three different handles to choose from, do they simply select the handle by clicking on the image?

[Philip Stears]

Great question - I've got the answer lined up for a separate post :-)