Questions from 8.3 Preview Power Hour

Ignition
1

There was an 8.3 Preview webinar today and there were some good questions asked that were sort of glossed over, probably for the lack of time and to get to as many questions as possible. That is understandable, but not satisfactory, in my opinion. I would like to ask some of those questions here, since I'm starting to plan for a very large Ignition system rebuild in the near future, so it would be nice to know how certain new features will work, even at a very high level.

Some of the questions that I can remember:

  1. Will the new Forms component be natively responsive? This was a question I also had, and it was answered in the affirmative, as if to mean "yes, you can view Forms on a smaller screen". However, I would guess the user probably means more of "how granular control does someone have over the layout of the Forms, based on the screen size" - for instance, on a desktop view, show 6 columns with content and on a mobile view, show only one column with vertical scroll. Does the new Forms component have any layout properties that can be customized or would you need to use the Form component in conjunction with a Breakpoint container, for instance?

  2. Related to Forms - how does the Form ensure that data doesn't get stale when used in Offline mode?

  3. Related to the "backend" of the Forms component - from the animations in the webinar, it looks like the entire Forms component exposes an object that can be saved to a database as a JSON payload, but are there built-in ways that allow users to maintain normalized database tables that save rows of data that the Forms component can consume and display, or do we need to save the entire object in the database when the Form is created / edited?

  4. Pan / zoom functionality - this is an item that is very highly voted on the Ideas portal, and the status was changed to "In Progress" over two years ago with the update "Specifications and prototyping are underway". BTW, that idea was posted over 4 years ago...

  5. Will there be the ability to add events to Drawings created with the drawing tool? In the webinar, it looked like you can add expressions to fill elements and whatnot, but can I add an onActionPerformed event on a certain node, for instance?

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  1. Will the new Forms component be natively responsive...

Mostly, yes. The form component uses CSS Flexbox layout. Columns, rows, and widgets, are all flex containers that will automatically shrink and re-arrange their items to the available space, within reason. You may customize each element further via it's style property. Our goal is to make basic form creation, layout, validation, and data collection easy.

  1. Related to Forms - how does the Form ensure that data doesn't get stale...

It doesn't. That's up to the submission data handlers.

  1. ...are there built-in ways that allow users to maintain normalized database tables that save rows of data that the Forms component can consume and display, or do we need to save the entire object in the database when the Form is created / edited...

No, sorry. The processing of form submission data is an area which we'd like to avoid. You are responsible for processing and storing the data once it reaches your handler (or endpoint).

  1. Pan / zoom functionality...

I'm glad you're interested in this. This is a feature that many of us are excited about. We paused development on this new container type in order to bring you the form component, as well as other more pressing 8.3 features. Development on this feature will resume once we release 8.3. It should be available very soon.

  1. Will there be the ability to add events to Drawings created with the drawing tool...

Soon. We have a ticket for adding this new component event to the Drawing component. I've escalated it slightly by linking it to this conversation. We'll address it as soon as we can.

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