[opencms-dev] Suggested changes to form generator

[Graeme Kidd]

> If you have code for this, I'd suggest adding it to bugzilla as an enhancement.
http://bugzilla.opencms.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1957

I also found a slight bug in the CSV exporter where the CSV delimiter is a semicolon instead of a comma which means excel doesn't format the fields into columns automatically:
http://bugzilla.opencms.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1958

> Another thing that would be nice is the ability to export reports to CSV. The reports are very useful to extract sub-sets of the form fields, but currently, the export feature exports all form fields. Our site editors frequently use Excel (don't ask me why) for lists of registrants etc. but they rarely want all form fields in those.

While looking into this I noticed a "TODO" comment in the "exportData" method in the CmsCvsExportBean class which mentioned that Alkacon are keen to make the exported data more relevant:
http://cvs.opencms.org/viewvc.cgi/alkacon/com.alkacon.opencms.formgenerator/src/com/alkacon/opencms/formgenerator/database/export/CmsCvsExportBean.java?revision=1.10&view=markup
/*
 * TODO: Access the CmsForm (or CmsFormHandler) and put out all 
 * fields in the exact order - put fields that do not exist any longer 
 * to the back (note: readAllFormFieldNames is required for the old values). 
 */

However for the CSV to match the content in the report seems to require a bit more work. At the moment I am not that worried about extra fields showing up, as extra columns can be easily deleted within excel. If I do get some extra spare time then I might try and revisit this.

Graeme