Weekly update – 4 September 2020

[ryan]

For whatever reason, the power was out for our neighborhood for one day this week. As a result, I’m running a day behind schedule here and haven’t yet finished some of the updates I’ve started in the core, so no core updates to report just yet. Instead, I’ve been focused on finishing up the newest FormBuilder version, which has taken nearly the whole week to finish, but I did manage to get the new version out today (available in the FormBuilder board), and I’m really happy with what it adds. Here’s what's new in version 44 of FormBuilder: 

This version makes significant improvements to FormBuilder's entries listing features and API. You can now find submitted form entries with selector strings just like you can with pages in ProcessWire. It’s like using $pages->find() except for form entries. You can perform queries on any field in the form and use several different operators. This also includes some of the new text matching operators new to the most recent PW master version.

The entries screen for any form now gives you option to search and/or filter based on any field in the form. You can also create multiple filters on top of one another, matching multiple fields or even multiple values for the same field.  
You can dynamically select what columns appear in the entries list, and in what order.  This is very much like the “Columns” tab in Lister or ListerPro. 

You can also search, filter, display and export field values from nested forms, which was not supported in earlier versions of FormBuilder. 

You can stack multiple search filters on top of one another for AND conditions. 

When it comes to keyword searches, in addition to searching individual fields in an entry, you can also search all fields in the entry at once (something you can't easily do with pages). 

You can now sort by any form field in the entries list by clicking the column headings. Also supports reverse order. In earlier versions of FormBuilder, you could only sort by ID or created date. 

The CSV export has been improved with options to export based on your filters/columns selection, or export all rows/columns.  In addition there are now options for letting you specify what type of column headings to use and whether or not to include a UTF-8 byte order mark (which some MS Office apps apparently prefer). 

In addition to all of the above, there have been numerous other minor optimizations, bug fixes and other improvements throughout FormBuilder. A few new hooks have also been added in FormBuilderProcessor. 

Note that versions 41, 42, and 43 were all minor-update versions that were only released casually in the FormBuilder board for specific cases. Version 44 of course also includes the updates from those 3 versions as well. 

FormBuilder v44 requires ProcessWire 3.0.164 or newer. To support the new search/filter/sort functions in the entries list, you must have MySQL 5.7 or newer. For earlier versions of MySQL, these features are disabled except for the “search all fields” option. 

Next week: back to core updates, and hopefully the newest ProCache version will be ready as well. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!