Posted by starbow on February 13, 2007 at 9:02pm
Sorry if I am spamming this group. My brain has been on fire, and I am hoping to get some feedback. Has anyone had time to look over the code and see if they think my approach is sound? Anyway, I will probably settle down soon :)
I repackaged the code and released it as a official module, so no more tarballs on my website (http://drupal.org/project/ahah_forms)
Also, I have submitted a proposal for a OSCMS Summit session on this material (http://2007.oscms-summit.org/node/226)
And you can read about my planned next steps http://starbowconsulting.com/blog/tao/ahah-forms-framework-released-module
cheers,
-tao
Comments
Promising approach
Looks to be simply and cleanly implemented. I think your main challenge is showing through documentation and examples how this makes all of our lives easier, and particularly how it frees up module developers to make use of the tools without having to master complex techniques. Your poll example is probably a good start.
I personally prefer descriptive names to technically correct ones. This might be better as "activeforms" rather than the - yes, correct, but poorly understood and jargony AHAH.
Thanks. I think you are
Thanks. I think you are right about Activeforms being a better name. AHAH is kinda clunky, and constantly writing "incremental page update" isn't much better.
BTW - do you think it would make sense to put this with the other subprojects in the Javascript Tools module?
Looks like a good Javascript Tools fit
I've added you as a committer to jstools. If you want to pursue this direction, please feel free to put code there in an /activeforms directory, or whatever you want to call it. And open an issue on jstools of category 'proposed addition'.
Have a look at the methods in jstools.js. Some of them might be useful to you. Particularly, there are js versions of Drupal's url(), element_children(), and element_properties(). The url function addresses clean url issues (via settings passed by jstools in the Drupal.settings object). If you find additional general methods that might go in jstools.js, pls open issues for them.
Great
Great, I am all in favor of combined efforts. Thanks.
AHAH framework vs. jstool's activeedit
Heya - I'm having a tough time figuring out how this differs from jstool's activeedit. Is this a replacement? Or do the two approaches serve different needs?
Any insights on the different approaches would be very helpful!
Different Needs
I need to look closer at activeedit, but my understanding is that module allows for in place editing (click on text, it is replaced by an editable textfield). Right now, I have been using the AHAH Framework to dynamically expand forms, basically adding and manipulating elements. The reason I called it a framework, is you can use the same infrastructure to achieve different effects. It is just one approach to formalizing/drupalizing the basic AHAH concept of attaching events to form elements, having those events call back to drupal and replacing a predefined area of the page with whatever drupal returns.
My current thought is to repackage it inside of jtools as something like activeform.