by John Brinkman

Created

May 26, 2011

Has it been two years already?  Seems like just the other day I published a tool for summarizing form content.

I’m sure it’s been sitting on your desktop for regular use.  In my day job I’m, often asked to look at customer forms.  Or I sometimes need to go back and review one of my own form designs.  The first thing I always want to know is the "big picture" of what’s inside this form.  That’s what the summary tool is all about. You’d be surprised what you can learn from a report. I’ll hopefully point out a thing or two in follow-up blog posts.

Now that we have a macro capability in Designer (yes, yes, still in beta) it’s time to migrate this functionality from being an external tool to a Designer macro.

Here are the files you need: FormReport.pdf and FormReport.txt (rename to FormReport.js).  If you need a reminder about how to install them with Designer, then read this blog entry.

 


COMMENTS

  • By c@tc.se - 10:52 AM on May 27, 2011  

    Impressive work John! I found spotting field bindings especially useful.

    Note: The name of the PDF link above is “FormReport.pdf”. The name of the actual PDF is “FormReporter.pdf”, and the name of the file the macro is looking for is “reporter”.

    Either change the macro (line 305) or the name of the PDF.

    • By John Brinkman - 11:16 AM on May 27, 2011  

      Thanks for spotting this. I’ve updated the macro to launch “FormReporter” (the .pdf is implicit)

  • By c@tc.se - 10:59 AM on May 27, 2011  

    By the way, make sure you don’t have any odd chars in the meta fields (I had my form description set to “PoC & SID” which turned out to be a show-stopper).

    The reporter.pdf debugger complains that ‘ReferenceError: hdr is not defined’. I can live with that :>

    • By John Brinkman - 11:36 AM on May 27, 2011  

      Well, this is embarrassing. Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve fixed the macro (again).

  • By c@tc.se - 11:04 AM on May 27, 2011  

    I just tried pasting a useful macro I wrote here. Apparently, the blog engine doesn’t like too much code…

  • By Justin - 9:42 AM on June 21, 2011  

    hmm, I get an error that says “illegal ‘return’ outside of a function body. Any ideas?

    • By Justin - 9:49 AM on June 21, 2011  

      whoops sorry, PEBKAC

  • By John Brinkman - 9:59 AM on June 21, 2011  

    Justin:
    Heh, heh. I hadn’t seen that acronym before. PEBKAC. I like it.

    thanks,

    John

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