CLONING FORMS NEEDED in NEXT VERSION of PHPRUNNER
I face numerous projects where the best design is to give each User the same Master table but a different Details table.
This way all of their filled out Forms which are stored in their own table keep them isolated from each other but also make lookups and searches much faster rather than having to perform sorts of one huge Details table that all users write to.
I can do this because I already know ahead of time how many Users I have and that they will under 20 in number.
So I replicate the same Details table, say, 11 times in PhpMyAdmin and give each Clone a uniform but unique name-- "hb_doris, hb_gabriele, hb_edith, etc, etc, ....."
But this form stores a lot of short numbers that I use lookups for to translate the field choices for the user and to translate in List and View what the number "2" represents such as: "Very interested in more products" or "Dermatologist", etc.
Where I might have 24 fields, over half using lookups of values in dropdown lists, I must do quite a manual setup for each field for List and Add and View and Edit and Fields where in one view a field might not be see or its read_only equivalent will be shown or not shown.
Now, for each Form I have to start all over again duplicating the same settings manually in PHPRunner.
Yesterday I investigated the PHPRunner 5.3 project phpr file to see if I might be able to take all of the project definitions and CLONE them over an over for each new User.
I was able to do this with a little trial and error.
It was a cut-and-paste job with a Search and Replace involved. But, when I started up the phpr project file (made unchanged backups, of course) I was very pleasantly surprised to see my 11 forms pop into view with all settings duplicated page by page, field by field, view by view.
NICE
But this would be an INVALUABLE UTILITY for PHPRunner in the next editions!
To offer a user once they have completely setup one Table (or one Custom View)-- A CLONE WIZARD : "Clone all Table/View settings now?"
Then a multi-step process:
- Select Tables or Custom Views
- How many times for each
- Enter comma separated names for each new Cloned Table
- PHPRunner generates identical tables with different names
- Cloned Tables and/or Views show up in Tables
- Each List, Add, Edit, View, etc has all the same settings
SAVE hours of work!
[size="4"]In my current project if I didn't do a PHPR clone process -- a bit laborious-- I would have had to manually go and touch and edit at least 464 fields so that they all have the same settings that my first Table has.[/size]