Form validation support - Phase I

FormFactory EX, our newest product, is enabling form builders to go where few salesforce form builders have gone before - salesforce write back. We just made another major leap in this space by facilitating form validation. Let’s see how this takes us into the world of web forms more than before.

First of all, why does this merit such importance? Well, web users, rightly so, expect to be told why their form submission failed and have an easy way to correct any mistakes. Without that ability, there’s a good chance of total data loss when there is a form submission error in the first page of the form. This is exactly what our recent releases addresses.

How do we solve this? Input components like the edit field, scrolling edit field, radio button, menu button, and check boxes have a new check box named "Set as required field" in their property dialog box. Once these are enabled, when any button with the "Update values" command is invoked (directly or through another component), all the required elements are checked to make sure that they have some data entered/ selected. If any of these components fails this check, an error message is displayed and all components that failed this check are highlighted with a red border. The form write-back mashup flow is aborted and the form reverts back to pre-submission state. This forces the form user to enter a value for those required fields and thus ensures data integrity on the server side.

As the first part of our broad push into empowering form developers, this is a great way for forms builders to create more web form-like forms with far less effort. Please send some feedback about what more you would like to see as part of our next phase. You can send your suggestions to support@dreamfactory.com or call us at 888-399-DREAM (3732).