[Catalyst] Forms and Plugins and Tutorials, oh my!!

Thu Aug 17 18:15:19 CEST 2006

Fellow Catalyst Enthusiasts,

The more I see of Catalyst the more I'm liking it.  I just started taking it
for a spin a week or so ago.  

After just finishing the HTML::Widget plugin portion of the Catalyst
tutorial yesterday I saw the post announcing the FormBuilder plugin.  Both
look very promising.  There are a couple of features I'd love to see
available in one form library or another.  I searched through the vast
asortment of available Catalyst plugins and didn't see what I was looking
for.  So I thought it might be best to ask if any of the current plugins
provide such functionality.  If none do perhaps someone will see this post
and think, "Hay, that would really be helpful.  I think I'll enhance my
plugin."

Are there currently any form libraries that integrate a WYSIWYG style HTML
editor such as the FCKEditor?  

Does any of the available form libraries have the ability to set the focus
to a particular field?  I have a simple bit of JavaScript that combined with
a <body onLoad="FieldFocus()"> will set the focus to the first form field on
a page if the page contains a form, but it would be nice to have such
functionality built into a form library.  For some reason my JavaScript
doesn't appear to work with HTML::Widget generated forms.  I haven't tried
it with FormBuilder generated forms yet.

Does any available form library implement input mask type functionality?
Okay, I'll admit it - I'm a fan of old-fashioned text based data entry apps.
When entering a date, for example, I much prefer to be able to enter
something like 02132006 into a text field and have the application
automatically add the separator characters transforming it to 02/13/2006.  I
absolutely hate drop-down boxes on html forms for date entry.  Input mask
type functionality is also helpful for such things as social security
numbers, phone numbers, etc.  

Does any available form library implement an autotab feature?  Extending the
example above it would be nice to have the cursor automatically skip to the
next field after entering the last digit of a date in a date field.  

And now I have a couple of image plugin related questions.  Are there any
Catalyst plugins to help deal with uploaded images?  I'm looking for
something along the lines of:

  1.  Generate a random name to avoid duplicate filename conflicts and move
      the uploaded image to an image directory.

  2.  Generate a thumbnail for the image.

  3.  Store the needed image path and size info in a database.

  4.  Helper functions to spit out an appropriate image tag in a template
      for images in the database.

Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.