BizzyBee’s BizzyThoughts

In the first part of this article I talked about why you should consider the Spry framework as a valid alternative for input validation in the browser. Now I’ll demonstrate how it works in Dreamweaver and in the next article, how to transfer the validation to Domino Designer (I decided to split up the article in different parts for the Dreamweaver side and for the Domino Designer side).

Adding the input validation to a form in Dreamweaver CS3

I invite you to start the beetorial to the left. In less than 5 minutes it shows you how to add input validation to a form in Dreamweaver CS3 (although it took more than 5 hours to build it :-)). I recommend running it in full screen (press <F11> in most browsers).

It’s not only intended for Notes developers, but is also useful for anybody that wants to learn about input validation in Dreamweaver CS3.

In the beemo I start with a form I already prepared (it’s loosely based on a form I found in The Art & Science Of CSS, a very inspiring Sitepoint book about practical and visually stunning CSS techniques.

I add validation to fields for name, email, date and checkboxes and I show how it looks like in the browser.

Bare in mind that the validation messages look a bit boring at the moment, but in a future part I will demonstrate how easy it is to create validation eyecandy.

I know there’s Dojo. I know there’s Prototype. jQuery. There are a lot of JavaScript libraries available, and most of them have objects dealing with input validation. I saw Rocky’s session about Dojo on LotuSphere. An inspiring session that got me started delving into it, but I found myself a bit disappointed about how it looks. There are 3 themes available that change the look and feel a bit, but they all look rather ugly to me. Creating a theme of your own, so they tell, is a huge work (and that’s why there are only 3 themes).

While thinking about alternatives, I started looking at Spry, the Adobe’s framework embedded in Dreamweaver CS3. Spry can do much more than input validation, but for now I’m only interested in this part. It’s available for free, but if you want the ease-of-use you will need Dreamweaver CS3.

In this first article about Spry, I want to show you why it can be important to you if you are a Dreamweaver user. It’s just a warming-up to get your attention actually :-).

In a second article I’ll start with a Dreamweaver prototype form and Spry it up and in a third article, I’ll transfer it to a Notes webform. If there’s enough interest, a fourth article could be about Sprying up an existing Notes webform.

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