Hi Carl. Great improvement! Here is what I noticed right after I uploaded and upgraded:
The blistering speed to creating a duplicate field. What I would like to see now is the ability to duplicate an entire "Section." I would also like to see "Section" mean a set of fields, rather than a simple visual effect.
Here's my real time dilemma. I'm working on forms which are in the finance and real estate industries. Most of these forms have both an "Applicant" and "Co-Applicant" section. Until now, I had to create each field. As you can imagine, many such fields were repetitive. Such as "Address" for each Applicant and Co-Applicant.
To make matters worse, each one of these fields had to be programmed with as many as twenty to thirty conditional arguments. Imagine a form with over one-hundred fields times twenty to thirty conditional arguments each.
Now comes your new release with the feature to duplicate a field. Congrats! This saves me manually programming each duplicated field as I had to do in the past.
However, I would like you to take this one step further, by creating the ability to duplicate entire sections. And by sections, I mean a parameter populated with multiple fields created within this zone.
This way, I could just click one button and duplicate an entire section filled with dozens of redundant fields. Then I would only have to do some typographical changes to the duplicated section.
If you did this, we could cut down the time we bill clients considerably. I'm right now working with forms which create legal documents on the fly, once the initial data is entered via a GF Form.
What is the final outcome? Well considering a lease application form for real estate is being billed out at four-thousand dollars. I can now reduce my time in half with just this simple field duplication feature. Now the form cost is reduced down to two-thousand dollars. However, if I was able to duplicate an entire section at a time, I would once again cut my time in half once more. And the end result would be a form costing my client only one-thousand dollars, rather than four-thousand dollars.
I realize alot of us are in computer related fields. But in order to expand the use of GF, we need to be able to adapt to very lengthy and complex forms using conditional logic. Such as legal, accounting, and real estate industries. All of which use very lengthy type of forms.
I'm truly grateful for the current feature. It has cut my time down in half. I would like to reduce it again in half with the above suggestion. It's the only way to fly and take on more work per work station.
But this will take a revision of coding. Whereby a "Section" would be read as a "Zone" whereby, fields can be placed within it. And the entire "Section" can then be duplicated. Much like the ability to duplicate fields and forms right now.
And here is another awesome suggestion: Lets make it possible to "MERGE" forms together. And to be able to export entire "Sections" as well as entire forms. This way we can then mash together new forms on the fly. Think about how fast you could work? It would be just like the days of Photo Shop. Where as a graphic designer, you always have dozens of graphic files you can copy and paste layers from different projects and create something brand new within minutes.
The same can happen for GF. We could take a "Section" and export it. Or simply save it as a "GF" on it's own. But when we wanted to put together a GF for the aero industry for instance; we could merge "Sections" together on the fly to create a brand new form within minutes!
This again will reduce costs and time creating GF's. This again brings down costs and increases the use and expansion of seeing GF's being utilized within hundreds of industries. Rather than just the "web" related industries.
If there is one flaw I see previous to today with GF, its the incredible time it takes to create a GF with field volumes spanning from twenty to several hundred in each GF.
What do other GF owners think?
1.) Would you like to be able to have GF create "Sections/Zones" to insert several fields within it? Yes/No
2.) Be able to then duplicate "Sections"? Yes/No
3.) Be able to merge GF's (thus being able to merge "Sections/Zones")? Yes/No
