Dev - JavaScript/AJAX/Web Form question

[Andrew Yager]

Hi,

As I've been playing with OfBiz, one thing that I have noticed is  
that quite a few of the web forms (particularly address forms) could  
really use some sort of JavaScript intelligence. For instance - when  
you are modifying the address for a Party, the State select box  
contains all the possible states that OfBiz knows about. Since OFBiz  
knows the relationship between states and countries, it would seem to  
make a lot more sense (from an end user perspective) to add a bit of  
JavaScript (perhaps AJAX?) intelligence so that the state list only  
showed states from the currently selected country.

I've noticed a relative lack of JavaScript hanging around OfBiz. Is  
there a particular reason for this, or is it more that no one has  
taken the time to do it yet?

Another obvious thing would be to make it show the name of the state/
country selected as the first option, rather than the not so friendly  
GeoId, but I think I need to think on how to do that more... (being  
very new to OfBiz, are there any glaringly obvious or slightly  
obfuscated suggestions for a solution that I would have missed?)

Thanks,
Andrew

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[David E. Jones]

On Jan 23, 2006, at 4:34 AM, Andrew Yager wrote:

> As I've been playing with OfBiz, one thing that I have noticed is
> that quite a few of the web forms (particularly address forms) could
> really use some sort of JavaScript intelligence. For instance - when
> you are modifying the address for a Party, the State select box
> contains all the possible states that OfBiz knows about. Since OFBiz
> knows the relationship between states and countries, it would seem to
> make a lot more sense (from an end user perspective) to add a bit of
> JavaScript (perhaps AJAX?) intelligence so that the state list only
> showed states from the currently selected country.
>
> I've noticed a relative lack of JavaScript hanging around OfBiz. Is
> there a particular reason for this, or is it more that no one has
> taken the time to do it yet?

I'd say it's a bit of both... It's funny you should mention this  
because I've heard the opposite from some people, ie that there is  
too much JavaScript in OFBiz. Still, it's easier to remove than add  
(even if it means reduced functionality) so I and many others would  
like to see more done in this area.

This particular thing has actually been discussed a couple of times,  
but I'm not aware of any active effort to get it built. In this case  
AJAX might be nice (though we haven't yet selected a good AJAX or  
JavaScript client library for OFBiz, we'd like to find a good, active  
open source one; perhaps the new one going into the Apache  
incubator...).

Another option would be to just setup some lists declared in JS code  
that is generated in the FTL file based on the State-Country  
relationships, and then use some simple JS function to change the  
list entries when a country is selected.

> Another obvious thing would be to make it show the name of the state/
> country selected as the first option, rather than the not so friendly
> GeoId, but I think I need to think on how to do that more... (being
> very new to OfBiz, are there any glaringly obvious or slightly
> obfuscated suggestions for a solution that I would have missed?)

In some cases this is very easy to do, like with the form widget. In  
other cases (if I understand correctly what you are getting at) it  
requires a lookup for the geoId and then a change to display that  
description.

-David


 
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