Developer Kit
Mandoforms Developer Kit
The Mandoforms Developer Kit includes everything you need to build and test forms on your desktop and allows you to develop and test your forms before transferring them to your staging server or live server. The Developer Kit contains two main tools, the Mandoforms Builder Tool to enable you to create forms, and the Mandoforms Test Server to allow you to test them.
The Developer Kit is available for both Windows and UNIX systems. For a full list of requirements, purchasing options, and downloads see Latest releases.
Mandoforms Builder Tool
The Builder provides a simple but powerful user interface that guides the user through the process of constructing forms.
The Builder has been designed for all types of users. Any untrained person could quickly type in the text of all the questions, a more sophisticated user could then add rules to the form, and a Web Developer could then specify how to interact with the server and the rest of the website. Thus large numbers of forms can be quickly and efficiently created.
Building forms
The Builder helps you to define the form's look and feel (size, colours, fonts, images) and enter the questions you wish to ask, their associated validation rules, and any navigational rules you might require such as the sequence in which to display pages. You can include features such as section headers and a progress bar for longer forms.
The left window of the Builder displays a tree-like view of the form, illustrating each page, the questions on the pages, and the rules associated with them. The navigational buttons on the form (back, next and so on) are also displayed in the tree view together with their appropriate actions (move to next page, submit to server).
The right window of the Builder is where you input form details such as the form questions, the type of "input component" to use such as a text field, date field, radio buttons, dropdown list and so on.
A large list of standard validation options are provided, including email address, telephone number, postcode and a range of values. Similarly, you can select from a standard list of navigational rules that affect how the form acts based on the user's answers to questions. Navigational rules include functions such as hide or show pages, set values and perform calculations.
To speed further the creation of forms a page Import/Export feature is available. This allows you to save individual parts of forms and re-use these features again, either within the same form or to develop different ones.
Viewing forms
A live preview facility allows you to view the form as you are constructing it so that you can immediately see what the form looks like as you change colours and fonts or add questions. Even the validation routines are 'live' in the form preview, so you can instantly see what your users will experience.
Test Server
By default, forms created with the Builder are saved so that they can be immediately served by the Test Server and accessed using a local browser. This enables you to easily test forms as you develop them, including the processing of the form data captured.
To achieve this requires a Web server that can respond to requests from your local browser to serve your forms. For your convenience a simple Web server is provided and is linked to the Test Server to process the captured data.
Details of the data processing capabilities are provided in Mandoforms Servers.
Pre-built example forms are provided and are linked to the Test Server homepage so you can try out Mandoforms for yourself straight away. These example forms are also accessible in the Builder so that you can modify and use them as a basis for developing your own forms.
The Test Server can be easily configured using browser-based administration and configuration tools that allow you to specify how the Test Server operates and how captured data should be processed. The Test Server provides full support for everything within the Enterprise Server, as well as the Database Plugin Pack.
Out-of- the-box, the Test Server provides you with everything you need to test your forms.
