Zugg Software :: View topic - Yet another COOL feature in zApp...HTML Forms

Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 11:30 pm

As everyone knows, whenever I'm sick I always seem to come up with nifty new ideas. Well, it seems to still work with zApp.

I was thinking about the new net library in zApp that provides all of the URL, HTTP GET, POST, etc functions. I've always been annoyed at how complicated some network libraries are. I like some of the simplicity of the PHP curl extension, but it is even too complicated with all of its SETOPT routines. I want zApp to allow you to easily access web resources.

As I was writing, it occured to me that I could make HTML forms really easy. After all, what is a form anyway but a group of controls that you want to send data from. On an HTML web page, a form is a rectangular area on the screen that contains various controls. Well, we have that already in zApp...it's called a zPanel.

So, I have added a simple extension to a Panel and a new Kind of Button. Take a look at this example of a typical zApp window:

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Does that follow the same syntax as the HTML forms? I can't remember off the top of my head, it looks similar though.

You probably need some way to specify between GET and POST requests? or will POST only be supported at this time?

Looks pretty nifty tho :)

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 1:22 am

Not quite. The things like <EDIT> are standard zApp objects and there is no attempt to make these the same as the HTML Form tags. For example, I think in HTML they are <INPUT> tags and you have stuff like "TEXTAREA" instead of <MEMO> and stuff like that. You'll be able to put any zApp control in a form and zApp will try to convert each control to the appropriate HTML syntax that most closely matches the component type.

As far as Get vs Post, there will certainly be a property you can set to change that, but the default is POST. Once again, I want the default to always try to do the right thing and these days, a huge percentage of forms are POST rather than GET.

Of course, the actual usefulness of this feature in "real life" is a bit limited because in most cases (like posting to this forum, for example) the server is using session control to prevent abuse and you cannot just post to a URL like this. So, this doesn't work in secure applications, but in non-secure cases it will work fine and might be useful to someone.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Shouldn't there be an actual password control? There are many places where it would be good for zApp to hide the password you're entering. Otherwise it looks great and I can think of several uses for it.

Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 12:26 am

The <EDIT> control has a property called "PasswordCh" that you can set to whatever character you want echoed in place of what the user types. For example, setting this property to "*" is a typical way to get a password control. You don't need a separate control.

In zApp, I'm trying to keep the number of controls relatively small and control variances with property values. So, there is one Editbox, one Combobox, one Memo control, etc. Rather than having separate TextMemo, RTFMemo, HTMLMemo, for example, like some languages do.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

I'm trying to set the PasswordCh property in the latest release of zapp, but seem to be failing miserably

<edit name='Edit2' PasswordCh='*' align='top'/>

either I'm very slow on the uptake (I'm probably doing it wrong) or it isn't implemented in this version.

Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 10:16 pm

The property is actually called "PasswordChar".

Keep in mind that some of these forum posts are old and that things can change in the actual release. Always check the documentation for the most up-to-date information. If you go to the zApp Manual and then into Object Reference and then select Edit you will see a list of properties on the left. While each property doesn't have detailed documentation yet, it at least shows what properties are available and what their correct spelling is.