Hi All, For a while now we have ben struggling with how to best gain control over forms in Freeway. There are some actions out there that are fast and simple but we have had some issues. According to Softpress one was causing unnecessary padding and other developers on this forum seem to promote using CSS styles directly through the “input” tag and so on. I have an idea how to accomplish this using standard CSS but a little unsure as to how to accomplish in Freeway.
Form actions allow you to see in Freeway what the output looks like. Will this be the case if CSS is applied to the form part using instead of using actions?
When I have seen examples from other Freeway developers the all seem to contain the form parts in a table. Is this a best practice?
Would it be a good idea to apply the necessary markup to the table cell itself to give it the necessary form part attributes, instead of dropping the freeway form part into the table?
I am familiar with how to use the input tag, thanks Tim, but how do I go about making two unique input styles?
Lets say we want two form buttons each with a different color, how would we go about defining each button so it uses its unique style as would be made in item 4?
Hi All, For a while now we have ben struggling with how to best gain
control over forms in Freeway. There are some actions out there that
are fast and simple but we have had some issues. According to
Softpress one was causing unnecessary padding and other developers
on this forum seem to promote using CSS styles directly through the
“input” tag and so on. I have an idea how to accomplish this using
standard CSS but a little unsure as to how to accomplish in Freeway.
Form actions allow you to see in Freeway what the output looks
like. Will this be the case if CSS is applied to the form part using
instead of using actions?
You would be able to see the effect of your changes in Freeway’s
Preview mode, but not in the design view.
When I have seen examples from other Freeway developers the all
seem to contain the form parts in a table. Is this a best practice?
Freeway lacks the ability to make a label (the actual label tag) for a
form field. The next best thing is to use a table to associate any
human-readable label text with the appropriate field it relates to.
Since a CSS-positioned layout could have the HTML for the “label” text
at the very top of the page code, and the form input near the bottom,
with acres of other code in between, using the structure forced on you
by the table is a good compromise in this regard. Many screen reader
applications (for the visually-disabled user) understand this
relationship, and even though there isn’t a formal label associated
with the form field, will infer from a two-column table that the text
on the left relates to the input on the right.
There’s another benefit to using a table – browsers vary their
display of form inputs quite wildly. A table can’t be broken by shifts
in element size, everything moves along to fit.
Would it be a good idea to apply the necessary markup to the
table cell itself to give it the necessary form part attributes,
instead of dropping the freeway form part into the table?
I’m not sure what you mean here. Are you talking about making the
table cell itself into the form input somehow? That’s not possible.
I am familiar with how to use the input tag, thanks Tim, but how
do I go about making two unique input styles?
Lets say we want two form buttons each with a different color,
how would we go about defining each button so it uses its unique
style as would be made in item 4?
You need some identifier to tell them apart. CSS would prefer you use
the id or class attributes, but you can even use the name attribute in
most modern browsers: input[name="foo"] { color: yellow; background- color:black; }. If you use the FormFix Action on your page, all of
the inputs will get an ID attribute, so you could use input#save { background-color: blue; }. If you single-click on your form element
in Freeway, you can open up the Extended dialog and add:
Name: class
Value: someNewClass
and then create a new style with the Tag set to .someNewClass and the
Name empty and apply any particular combination of style attributes
there.
As for item #3, yes I was referring to turning the form cells into lets say a form text input field and so on. Had read on other forums, not Freeway centered, that this was a good thing to do. As for the rest of my questions your response has been most helpful as I have now been able to gain control over select form parts. From here I can start playing with styling.
Just noticed that I am not getting the hand when I mouse over the button. I see that there is a setting in the character style menu that gives me some options but Default and Auto produce no visible result. Don’t see a selection for hand, tried the wait and that does give me the watch.
Does this need to be added in the extended?
Are there missing attributes since I have applied the Form Fix Action to the page?