Colorful Forms in Zoho Creator

Nov 09 2009 05:30:00 AM Posted By : Aparna
Comments (6)
How would you like it if the plain looking form that you created in Zoho Creator which looked like this,

Simple Form
could be transformed to look like this,
Coloured Form 1
this,
Coloured Form 2
or this? 
Coloured Form 3

Great, right? Yes, it is possible to revamp your forms into stunning works of art. The actual forms displayed above can be accessed from

Plain

ArtWork1

ArtWork2

ArtWork3

Zoho Creator offers a plethora of customizing options for your forms. You can find these options in the embed dialog. Click on the "Customize Form Properties and Look and Feel" to reveal the options. The customization options are divided into 4 sections, each section offering customization parameters for various parts of the form.

Customize


The first section offers modifications for some basic configurations for your form like the page/iframe to which the user should be re-directed to, on submitting data into the form,  the success message to be displayed when data is submitted in the form, the background and border color to be applied to the form etc. For specifying any attribute involving color, you'd have to specify the rgb or hex code. You can use guides like this or this to give you the exact color codes. For example, you can specify the background color for the form in the box provided as #FF9999 or rgb(255,153,153). For standard colors like teal, cyan etc you can use the color names as well. Once you key in the color code and click outside the  textbox, you can notice that the text box where you entered the code displays the color specified by you. This way you can make sure you are setting the desired color.The height, width attributes can be specified in pixels or % e.g., 50px or 50 %. And did I mention, you can also hide the form header as well? Yes you can do that too!

Now that we've applied some background coloring to the form, lets tweak the header and footer of the form a bit. The second section will help you with that. The header is the top strip in the form which contains the form name. The footer is the bottom strip containing the "Submit" and "Reset" buttons in the form.You can specify a color for the header so that it matches your form's background color, the height, if the form name is being displayed, the font in which the form name is it to be displayed, the font size and the font color as well. As for the footer, in addition altering the color and height, you can specify a number of attributes for the buttons being displayed. How about setting background color, font family, text color to be applied to the button when the form is loaded and when there is a mouse over the button etc for the buttons in your form? Terrific? You can do that too.

Coming to the most important part of your form. The fields. The third section deals with giving the field labels and the fields themselves the right look. You can set a background color for the field labels so that they are highlighted and stand out from the background, the font family, font size and font color and also the width of the label. Supposing you have a loong label and if you'd like to wrap it to your convenience, you can give a small value for the width. Or if you would not like the field label to wrap then you can give the value accordingly. For the fields, you can specify the background color, width, the font color,family and the size as well. 

Now that you've splashed enough color in your form, you can set right some heights and widths. In the final section, for each field type supported in Zoho Creator, you can specify the width and height attributes. e.g., if the form contains 5 Single Line fields, the specifications mentioned here will be applied to all five fields. 

Once you have picked and chosen the attributes from the various sections, you'd notice that some parameters have been appended to the code snippet. Copy the code snippet as is and paste it in your blog/website and boom! Your colorful form, looking just the way you want it to is ready to go!


Themes and Layouts for Zoho Creator

Oct 21 2009 08:30:00 AM Posted By : Aparna
Comments (1)

Have you ever felt that it would be nice if your Zoho Creator application could do with a different layout or color or font? Think no more. You can apply different layouts, colors, fonts and loads of other customizations to your Zoho Creator applications. No you don't have to be an html or css expert to do that. As is the norm at Zoho Creator, all this is possible at the click of a mouse.

Zoho Creator offers 6 different layouts for your applications. You can choose from Pane Left, Pane Right, Tabs,Tabbed Pane Left, Tabbed Pane Right and Dropdown menus. You can segregate your forms/views into various sections and apply the required layout so that your application gets the right look.

Layouts

Did you say what about the feel? Of course of course. We took care of that too. Zoho Creator offers 3 built in themes which can be applied to an application. Themes define the colour scheme of the application viz the colors that will be applied to the header strip, the component header, the buttons on the forms, etc., the over all font that will be applied to the application, the different styles that will be applied to the headers/tabs/ component headers/ forms/ views etc and so on.

Classic theme

The above one is what we call the Classic theme. Simple, straightforward, official looking which uses the Arial font across the application. The field labels are left aligned. Each form/view has a prominent looking header strip. And the views have borders on all sides.

The one below is the Gradient theme. A soft looking theme with Verdana font used across the application and a gradient applied to the header strip of the application. The field labels take the color of the theme.

Gradient Theme

The last but definitely not the least is the Contemporary theme. With Georgia font for the application and a very vibrant looking header strip for the application. The field labels/fields are center aligned and the rows in the view come with alternate row colors.

Contemporary

For now, the themes are available in 5 vibrant colours.

Theme Colours

The readymade themes don't quite hit home? Not a problem. You can also mix and match the various attributes and create your own themes. Again all these involve mere mouse clicks and no geeky coding!

Custom Theme

As you can see, we have ten attributes that you can play around with and come up with astounding themes for your application.You can also refer our help wiki for more details on creating different looks for your application.. 

So what are you waiting for? Give that plain looking application a dash of color and some style :)

Medicfusion has integrated Zoho Creator into their EMR (Electronic Medical Record) system to offer their customers the ability to design their own intake forms, questionnaires and basic patient surveys. Says Melisa Kirby Rottinghaus, Medicfusions's CEO,

For the first time ever, fully custom intake, exam forms and patient research studies are integrated into an electronic medical record. Exciting "in the clouds" integration between Medicfusion EMR and Zoho Creator makes it possible. [...] Until now, integration of a physician’s proprietary forms into an EMR wasn’t possible. Not without many thousands of dollars in custom form development and even then, not fully integrated. Now it’s possible, thanks to the roll-out of a revolutionary and very exciting integration between Medicfusion EMR and Zoho Creator. [...] For Medicfusion and Zoho Creator, it represents an important technical advancement, utilizing "cloud computing" in exciting new ways with important market implications.

The videos below explain in detail how the custom forms built using Zoho Creator form an integral part of the Medicfusion system.

Thanks to Pascal Veilleux of NSI Solution, the man behind this integration, who is doing a great job as a Zoho Reseller, and to Medicfusion for using the Zoho Creator Platform. Pascal has a detailed blog about this project too.

Zoho Creator Partner Program

Aug 27 2009 06:10:36 AM Posted By : Raffic
Comments (6)

Zoho Creator, Platform-as-a-Service has successfully deployed 100,000 database apps and has helped more than 400,000 users (individuals and small businesses) to build and deploy business applications that are flexible and affordable.

Zoho Creator partner program is quietly and steadily growing, adding new resellers from around the world. Our Partner Program is targeted to drive Value Added Resellers (VARs), IT Consulting Services, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and industry solution providers to build a variety of business apps within days and deliver to customers across regions. With Zoho Creator, VARs will be able to sell customized and robust apps to their clients in minimal time.

Check out what Mark of Credible Systems (one of Zoho Creator's Partners) has to say about the platform:

Benefits of Zoho Creator Partner Program

  • Join for free
    There is no charge to join the Zoho Creator Partner Program. Sign up and participation is completely free!

  • Develop Apps for free
    Zoho Creator is 100% free for VARs. Zoho Creator lets partners to create unlimited apps for free

  • Flexible and Low-cost pricing model
    VARs can set their own pricing. Partners have to pay just $3.5 per user (50 user pack @ $175)
    For eg: You can set your own pricing as $10/user where as you only pay us $3.5/user

Interested to join the program? Please fill in this form and our representative will get in touch with you.

Did we say that Zoho Creator is a lot cheaper ($3.5 per user) than Force.com ($7.50 per user)?

How to send SMS from Zoho Creator apps

Aug 19 2009 08:25:10 AM Posted By : Yoge
Comments (3)

One feature request that we receive frequently from our customers is the ability to send SMS from Zoho Creator apps. The solution is to have a third-party SMS Gateway service that supports HTTP(s) or SMTP API integrated with the Zoho Creator app.

Clickatell is one such service and we'll explain below how a Zoho Creator application can be configured to use Clickatell's SMTP API to send SMS. We have created a simple Zoho Creator application for this. The script (.ds file) for the application is available here. Download the .ds file and open it in a text editor of your choice. In the sendSMS function,

  1. Replace clickatellusername with username of your Clickatell account
  2. Replace clickatellpassword with password of your Clickatell account
  3. Replace APIKEY with API ID of your Clickatell account

void sendSMS(int to, string text)
{
sendmail
(
To : "sms@messaging.clickatell.com"
From : zoho.loginuserid
Subject : "SMS"
Message : "user:clickatellusername\npassword:clickatellpassword\napi_id: " +
"APIKEY\nfrom:ZohoCreator\nto:" + input.to + "\ntext:" + input.text
Content type : Plain Text
)
}

After doing the above changes, import the ds file to your Zoho Creator account. The SMS feature can be tested by adding a record in the SMS Details form. Once the sendSMS functionality is tested, this SMS app can be integrated to any other Zoho Creator application by invoking the sendSMS function and passing the mobile number & the text message as arguments.

For example, in a Help Desk application built using Zoho Creator, let's say an SMS is to be sent to a technician whenever a new ticket is assigned to him/her. The function sendSMS should be invoked with the mobile number of the technician from the onSuccess action of the Assign Technician form.


Please note that you can use any SMS provider by modifying this example SMS application. Try this app and let us know your feedback.

A Tweet is a Quote

Aug 01 2009 10:37:10 AM Posted By : Raju Vegesna
Comments (0)


How many corporate websites have you seen featuring customer quotes on the home page? How about those quotes in press releases we see every day? The quotes we see day to day from websites to press release are obviously 'processed' by individuals or teams before they show up publicly. They obviously are highlighted because the quote conveys something good about the company.

The question is, how authentic are these quotes? How many times did you try to contact the person who was quoted on a website or an article or a press release?

When a customer or a user is willing to say something publicly, that becomes a quote. When this user automatically compresses his opinions to less than 140 characters, it is even better. This is basically what a tweet is. A Tweet is a quote because it is a public statement coming directly from the user with no marketing polish around it. While a quote becomes public after a company approval, a tweet is the opposite. The best part is, you can contact the person quoted for a followup discussion.

With this in mind, we list tweets from our users as quotes. Obviously, we need an application to do this, so what better application platform than Zoho Creator to build something like this. So we quickly created a creator app that lists user's tweets on Zoho. We will soon publish this app in our marketplace.



My all time personal favorite though is this tweet from one of our users @chrismunns. It makes me chuckle.



Now, can you imagine seeing something like this on a press release or a website? But that is what makes it authentic. Because this is a tweet coming from a live user, you can respond for a followup conversation. This actually makes a Tweet better than a Quote.

 
Microsoft Access is basically a database application on the desktop. Where as, Zoho Creator is a powerful, scalable, and secure cloud computing platform that lets you build and run database applications online. Some of our users call it as 'Microsoft Access + Visual Basic for the web' (Sorry, PDF). So, what happens when you migrate data from Microsoft Access to Zoho Creator? Well, it can become a powerful web application. This is basically what we are doing with our announcement today. We are excited to announce the latest addition to our family of Microsoft plug-ins - Zoho Plug-in for Microsoft Access (EXE link).


Two weeks back, we integrated our collaborative productivity applications into Microsoft SharePoint. Last week, our project management application added the capability to import your existing projects from MS Project to Zoho Projects 2.0. This week, we have a new add-on that imports your data effortlessly from Microsoft Access to Zoho Creator and Zoho Reports and does much more.


So, what happens when you migrate your database (MDB file) from Microsoft Access to Zoho Creator? Your entire database structure and data are migrated to Zoho Creator and an application is automatically created with Forms (Tables) and Views etc. This is a quick way of creating a web-based collaborative database app from your non-collaborative Microsoft Access DB. Once the Microsoft Access DB is migrated to Zoho Creator, the collaborative aspects kick in where the entire application (or parts of it) can be shared with multiple users.

To summarize the core functionality of this plug-in in three short points, this is what it does...
  • Migrates your Database from Microsoft Access (MDB File) to Zoho Creator & Zoho Reports
  • Automatically creates a web-based database app from your Microsoft Access database &
  • Allows you to share your applications with others
This video will give you a good idea on how this works...





Also check out: Why you should migrate from MS Access to Zoho Creator

Zoho Creator platform offers more flexibility for your applications. Once you have your app migrated from your MDB file, you can edit your existing application online and can also add additional business logic using Deluge Script, our scripting language. The power of Deluge Script makes it easy to design business workflows and perform a variety of automated actions based on the criteria specified. If you have your app created and if you are not a Creator expert, but want to take advantage of our advanced functionality, we have many developers in our community who are willing to help you with your app. If you think your migrated application can be valuable for other users, you can also sell your application in Zoho Marketplace.

Once you have your app created in Zoho Creator, it can also be deployed onto Google AppEngine.

Migrate Microsoft Access DB to Zoho Reports:

This migration tool not only imports your data to Zoho Creator, but it can also import the data to Zoho Reports, our Online Business Intelligence tool that lets you analyze your data and create powerful reports including charts, pivot tables, dashboards etc. Once you have your data imported from Access, similar tables are automatically created in Zoho Reports and are available for analysis.

This Migration tool is available for free. So whether you want to create a web-based database app from your existing data, or analyze your data or share it with others, this migration tool makes it extremely easy.


We certainly hope you'll find this tool useful. As usual, we can't wait to see the amazing apps you build on our Zoho Creator platform.
Zoho Creator charting functionality helps you to quickly and easily analyze data in a visual format using a variety of graph types. To create charts with data from multiple ZC forms or to display grouped data, you can use the chart API supported by Zoho Sheet. The  Sample Application named "Student Management" demonstrates this functionality. In this application, we have defined a function called "getChartUrl" (you can see the function used in the application under the Script -> Functions tab in edit mode), using which the required data is dynamically submitted  to Zoho Sheet API, which creates the required chart as an image.


About the application

The Student Management application comprises of the following forms :

  • Student Form to enter the name of the students and the country they belong to.
  • Course Form to enter the name of the courses offered.
  • Student Course Form to enter the course details enrolled by each student. 

The Country Chart view  displays a 3D Bar Chart which depicts the total number of students enrolled in each course for the selected country, as shown in the image below.  The bar chart is created by passing the required data as parameters to the Zoho Sheet chart API.

To learn about the steps in creating a chart in Zoho Creator using the Zoho Sheet API, refer this Wiki Page.
Creating charts using Zoho Sheet API

Functionality based URLs in Zoho Creator

Apr 30 2009 04:45:24 AM Posted By : Latha
Comments (1)
In the blog topic Zoho Creator URL Patterns we learned about the default URL patterns to quickly access a Zoho Creator application and its forms, views and report formats.  Advanced URL patterns for Zoho Creator Forms and Views are  listed below:

1. To set default values for form fields

The default values for form fields can be set by passing additional parameters to the form URL.  For example, to automatically load a value for Employee ID field in http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#Form:Employee the default values is passed as querysting(Employee_ID=1234) to the url, where Employee_ID is the script name of the field in your name.

The form url with query string will be,
http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#Form:Employee?Employee_ID=1234


2. To edit individual records by passing record ID in the URL

The url to view and edit individual record using its record ID is given below. This will display the zoho creator form in edit mode.

http://creator.zoho.com/<zoho username>/<applinkname>/#Form:<formLinkName>?recLinkID=<recordID>&viewLinkName=<viewlinkname>

Refer the topic Editing Records via Record ID for more information.


3. To set criteria for a view

The criteria for a view can be passed as part of a query string to a view url. Multiple criterias can be specified by appending it along with the URL using '&'

The URL format for setting criteria with "=" (Equal) operator is given below:

http://creator.zoho.com/<zoho userName>/<applinkname>/#View:<viewlinkname>/<FieldName1>=<FieldName1 Value> &<FieldName2>=<FieldName2 Value>

where, FieldName1 & FieldName2 are the Deluge script names for the field in the form and multiple criterias are specified by appending it along with the URL using '&'

Example: 

The view http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#View:Employee_View lists all the records in the Employee View. To  view records with Name EQUALs Henry and Employee ID EQUALs 1234, we need to pass the field name and value as querystring.

The complete  url for this example is,
http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#View:Employee_View?Name=Henry&Employee_ID=1234

The URL format for setting criteria with operators other than "=" (Equal) is given below: 

http://creator.zoho.com/<zoho username>/<appLinkName>/#View:<viewLinkName>/<FieldName1>=<FieldName1 Value> &<FieldName2>=<FieldName2 Value>&<FieldName1_op>=<constant>&<FieldName2_op>=<constant>

 where,

FieldName1 & FieldName2 are the Deluge script names for the field in the form.
FieldName1_op & FieldName2_op are parameter names for the operator (fieldname appended by _op).
constant is the value assigned for each operator. Refer the table to view the list of all operators and their constants.
 

Example1:

The view http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#View:Employee_View lists all the records in the Employee View. To  view records with Employee ID GREATER_THAN 1235, we need to pass the field name, value, parameter name for the operator and its value as querystring. The parameter name for Employee_ID is Employee_ID_op and the constant for GREATER_THAN is 21.

The complete  url for this example is,
http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#View:Employee_View?Employee_ID=1235&Employee_ID_op=21

Example2:

The URL to view records with EmailID ENDS_WITH zoho.com and Roles CONTAINS Supports,
http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#View:Employee_View?EmailID=zoho.com&EmailID_op=25&Roles=Support&Roles_op=26


Note:

For some operators like EMPTY, NOT_EMPTY, YESTERDAY, TODAY, NEXT_YEAR, TRUE, FALSE, etc. the criteria value need not be specified. For example, the following URL will display records from the "Employee_View" whose "Date of Joining" falls on the "CURRENT_YEAR".

http://creator.zoho.com/zchelp/employee-manager/#View:Employee_View?Date_of_Joining_op=52 



Introducing Zoho Mobile

Apr 28 2009 06:17:23 AM Posted By : Raju Vegesna
Comments (14)
Zoho MobileOver the past year or two we have had some initiatives on mobile capabilities for selected Zoho applications. With Zoho Mobile, we are aggregating all our previous initiatives with consistent user interface and extending it to multiple applications and mobile platforms.

Zoho Mobile can be accessed from your favorite smart phone @ http://mobile.zoho.com (or http://m.zoho.com to keep it short). In the current version of Zoho Mobile, the following applications are available.
  • Zoho Mail
  • Zoho Calendar
  • Zoho Writer
  • Zoho Sheet
  • Zoho Show
  • Zoho Creator
These browser-based applications come with a consistent user interface across multiple mobile platforms. We currently support the following mobile platforms.
  • iPhone
  • Android
  • BlackBerry
  • Windows Mobile &
  • Symbian (S60 Platform)
We certainly plan to expand the coverage to other platforms like Palm moving forward. Also, the applications we support on these platforms will be expanded further as some of our Business applications make their way into Zoho Mobile. We also have plans to offer some native applications for selected platforms under Zoho Mobile.



Zoho Mobile is also localized to Japanese. We plan to make this available in additional languages soon.

Do give Zoho Mobile a try from your mobile phone and let us know your feedback.