There have been a lot of discussions and threads recently related to the next release of Dynamic Forms. I wanted to add a roadmap forum post for everything that we currently have planned for the next release.  As far as ‘release date’ we will not be announcing it right now but the plan is currently to have the beta release out by the end of October or early November. We hope to have the release go with the upcoming DotNetNuke OpenForce Conference. Please be patient as we want to have time to test these great enhancements... Also, all users who have purchased v2.3 will receive an 80% discount towards 2.5..

Roadmap of upcoming features…

Client Events

New feature ‘Client Events’, will be able to offer powerful flexibility and functionality to Dynamic Forms. Client side events will bring the framework to the module that will offer powerful flexibility both initially and in the future release’s. 

Client events will initially be able to offer:

• Calculation Fields
  • Example 1:  $(Field3) = $(Field1) * $(Field2)
  • Example 2:  $(Field3) = $(Field1) + $(Field2) + $(Field4) 
  • Additional examples will include the ability to perform logical coding for advanced users
• Quickly Show / Hide HTML field types throughout form
• Quickly Show/Hide Submit Button (i.e. don’t display Save/Submit button until after they check the terms and conditions box)

New Completion Event Type

A new completion event type is being created to handle HTTP Posts, with this new event you will be able to complete an HTTP Post to any URL you would like to in case you want to also post form results or certain parts of form results to another form. As with other completion events  you will be able to fire the event for each form submission or based conditionally on a questions response. With this new feature you will be able to post any forms data onto another form or web service such as SalesForce.com or virtually any form you can post to.

Question Event Enhancements

Question Events will now allow for HTML Field types to easily parse field results and include tokenized results (i.e. $(FirstName) – Your total comes too etc... )

Dynamic Payment Gateway

• New feature to integrate with Authorizenet payment gateway (other payment gateways to follow in the future)
• Payment gateway will allow you to process payments through Dynamic Forms…
• Build interactive form payments by utilizing client side calculation fields to create “Total Price”
• Dynamic Events will process only after payment is complete, offering ability to then process emails, add users to DNN Roles, process any SQL Events/HTTP Form Posts, etc…

Form Layout Enhancements

• New feature to set column span on fields (useful for multi column field rows and more)
• Ability to control main form style properties
• New feature to quickly clear form fields
• New results module…. New module to display form results based on a header/item/footer template.  Within module settings you will be able to select which  form instance the results should be displayed from

General Functionality

• New feature to allow for ‘Save for Later’, this feature will allow the form to be accessed via a URL that can be emailed out to later go back in and manage the form. This form will also allow Administrators to go back in and manage a particular form field/response.
• Quickly set sort order of fields, while setting sort order a pop up will notify you where that form field will fit within the form
• In-Line Editing - You will now be able to maintain the registration header/footer, and the questions label and so forth with in-line editing. This means that you will be able to click on the label and change the label directly on the user-facing page without having to go into the administration area (similar to how the DotNetNuke text module works in 4.5.x).
• New validation enhancements. Now if the user errors on a required field it can either throw them to the top of the form, the bottom of the form, set the focus on the first field that errors, etc... Additionally (and this is great!) you can specify a stylesheet class for fields that have thrown the validation error. So you could potentially change the stylesheet class to have a red background and it would highlight the fields that the user missed with the red background etc...
• Easier field maintenance: Short field names will now be used with HTML field types, fields labels longer than 40 characters will be truncated within the manage questions dropdownlist.
• Ability for hidden field and textbox fields to be SQL driven (currently only field types such as dropdownlist, checkbox groups, radio buttons, listbox, and other related fields allow for SQL driven question values)

Future enhancements….

Although it won’t make this release we are also researching more templated based form layout options and also auto creating custom tables based on forms (optionally) so that users who want to post data to these tables can do so easier (right now you can already do this by creating a custom table and using Dynamic SQL Events but we hope to release something that is easier for users to use without any SQL knowledge).

PayPal is a must out of the gate for this I think. I could use that feature tomorrow!

Client validation when the Submit button is clicked would make for a niche touch, and it would be useful for those fields which are not textboxes which don't support the onblur event.

Keep up the good work, and please help me out with the Checkboxes issue

Cheers,

BigAl

Will the new release have any support to implement dependent lists / cascading dropdown lists like Country >> Region ? Or, is this functionality already available in the current version?

As you know I have been asking this question in the past also. ... You gave me a work-around until you implement the dependent-list functionality. I used that work around but I have few questions there too

1. I implemented dependent list functionality by using "Question Event" feature to show one of the 10 dependent child lists only when a particular value is selected in the Parent list. This is working fine. But I ended up having 10 different child lists and 10 different variable names for my dependent variable for use in form submission.

Here are the details. I want to capture user's church location in my form. I organized Church locations by USA Region. I grouped all the States into 10 Regions in the USA. The first drop down list is "USA Region" with 10 entries (one for each Region: REgion 1, Region 2, Region 10,etc.) Once a User selects his/ her Region, I want to show the list of Churches in that Region in the 2nd Dropdown box so that the user selects the correct Church user belongs to. And I want to store that value in a form field called "Your Church". I am able to capture User's Region into "Your Region" but there are now 10 different fields for the selected Church like Region 1 Church, Region 2 Church, Region 3 Church, etc. because the work around requires me to create 10 different lists but to show only one based on the selected Region.

I also want the user to enter his / her church in the "Your Church" field if his / her Church is not found in any of the lists I am providing. That means, I need a third field to capture the User's Church if not found in the lists. So I created a new field called "Your Church" - a text field.

Here is what I expect the user to do:
Step 1: User selects his / her Region from the "Your Region" list.
Step 2: System displays one of the 10 "Church Lists" based on the selected Region (using Question event feature). The 2nd row will have fields shown like "Your Region 1 Church", Your Region 2 Church", etc.
Step 3: User selects a valid Church if present in the list shown; otherwise selects "Other" at the end of the list.
Step 4: System should display the selected Church in the third field "Your Church". If a valid Church is selected, this field should be READONLY; if user selects "Other", this field should allow user to enter a value manually. In any case, this field should contain the User's Church finally. All these mechanisms are there to simplify the entry of user's Church in an accurate way.

I am able to implement the first 3 steps: User is able to select the Region and the Church in the selected Region. But selections are getting stored in different fields like Region 1 Church, Region 2 Church, etc. But I want the selection to be stored in one field called "User's Church".

Here is the page with DF 2.3.7 functionality I implemented so far here.

Here is the original form (html + Javascript + asp) I am now trying to implement in DNN using DF 2.3.7
http://www.sathyasaicenters.org/wycsurvey/formembers.asp

Can you help me on how to accomplish this with DNN 4.5.5 + DF 2.3.7?

Regards,
Vijay