MachForm Community Forums » MachForm 3

1. ironsoup
   Member

   Hello! Love the new machforms tool. Though I just discovered a bug that hopefully can be fixed in the next release.

   Basically, if you click "Create Form", machforms creates the new form entry in the ap_forms table as expected. But if you do not hit "Save Form" and simply go back to the manage forms page, that Untitled Form still exists in the ap_form table, instead of being deleted as it should have since I didn't actually save that new form. Unfortunately this leads to all these ghost entries in the ap_form table with no actual forms tied to them. I noticed this after testing out the edit form functionality a lot without ever saving a form. Then when I finally saved a form to view I noticed the ID was not "1" but a much larger number.

   Hope I was clear!

   Thanks,

   -Mike

   Posted 12 years ago #
2. 

   yuniar

   Thank you for the feedback on this.
   This is actually not a bug, because we expect it that way (at least for now).

   We aware that when you open the edit form page it will insert a new record within ap_forms table and won't be deleted.
   Rest assured that this temporary records won't affect any functionality of your forms.

   However we do have the plan to add some cleanup mechanism, to delete those unused records.
   We'll be adding this when we release the version which support multi users functionality, soon.

   Thanks Mike!

   ---

   MachForm Founder

   Posted 12 years ago #

3. ironsoup
   Member

   Sounds good!

   Posted 12 years ago #

4. ironsoup
   Member

   Hello Yuniar, it has been a couple of months since I originally made this post, and Machform has had some updates since then. I'm still on the same version of Machform since when I wrote this (3.0). I wanted to ask if you and your team have made any changes to Machforms since the latest update to cleanup forms as mentioned in my original post? That is, so that once forms are deleted they do not leave any remnants / ghost entries in the various Machform tables within the database? I love the product but am hesitant to upgrade other installations until the cleanup component is handled. Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't feel great about having a product that leaves all these empty tables and entries that aren't connected to anything in the system.

   Any feedback on this would be great, thanks!

   -Mike

   Posted 12 years ago #

5. ironsoup
   Member

   Yuniar,

   Just to add (for what it's worth), Machform version 2 seemed to handle this issue with no problem, correctly removing tables corresponding to the recently deleted form. Version 2 even waits until you actually hit save form to create a form table, as opposed to version 3.x where it creates the form table as soon as you hit "Create new form" whether or not you actually save that form.

   -Mike

   Posted 12 years ago #
6. 

   yuniar

   Hi Mike,

   This was planned for v3.3 indeed. However, when we thought this further, I feel that we should leave this behavior intact, due to some reasons.
   Hence we canceled the idea to do automatic cleanup on "ap_forms" table.

   To clarify, there is no unused table, only unused records within "ap_forms" table.

   The main reason is that this temporary record is being used to automatically save your form (when you build your form) in the background. Similar as "Auto Save" functionality on Microsoft Word. So when you build a form (particularly large form) MachForm will automatically saves your form fields in the background, using temporary records.

   This is very useful when your browser crashed, somehow, and you haven't saved your form. If you contact us, we can help you restore your unsaved form (actually, few people already contacted us for this reason and we were able to restore the form, which made them happy! :-)

   Version 2 doesn't create any temporary records indeed, but when you build a large form and then your browser crashed, all your form fields are lost as well, if you haven't saved it.

   The drawback for this approach is of course, the unused records on "ap_forms" table.
   However, considering the benefit is far greater than the drawback, I think we'll go ahead with the temporary records method.

   I suggest to update your MachForm v3.3 because there are other bugfixes which is far more important than this one and some new features (multi users, signature field, etc).

   ---

   MachForm Founder

   Posted 12 years ago #

7. ironsoup
   Member

   Thanks for the in-detail reply Yuniar. If only in a future version of Machform you could implement a plugin functionality (similar to wordpress) so developers could, for example, create an auto-cleanup plugin :)

   Though it would be nice if you could detect the activity of a form that was autosaved. And if it has no fields defined and no submissions say, for a month, it would then and only then auto cleanup the entries (or it would ask/prompt the user if they would like to delete the form and clean up the unused entries).

   Anyways, just my 2 cents. Thanks again!

   -Mike

   Posted 12 years ago #

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