Google Group - Better Q&A

I've been trying to plug in to whatever community of iForm developers I can find. I am in both of the Yahoo groups that I'm aware of, subscribed to the PCM listserv, posted some forms to the iFormLibrary, attend the weekly conference call hosted by McKesson, and I created this blog. (If there are more sites or groups to join, please let me know!)

I just set up a Google Group called HEO iForms as a "Q&A forum" to add another place to try to get help. You may have seen "Q&A-type" forums before; they're the kind of forum where, instead of new threads, you specifically ask a question. Others can submit their questions, comments, and answers and the answers can be "voted" on.

Visit the Forum at: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/heo-iforms
Or send an email to: heo-iforms@googlegroups.com

Like I said, I'm part of other user forums and user groups, but I haven't seen much activity on those groups. From the weekly phone calls, it's apparent that people have questions, and I'd love to help in any way that I can, either by giving answers, or if nothing else, providing a mechanism by which your questions can get to the people that have the answers.

If there's one thing that I can say about our issues, it's that they are not unique. Many of the questions that I hear are those that we had to figure out ourselves. Let's stop reinventing the wheel; there's too much other work to do.

FTP Notes and Rules

When I first started working on our iForms, no one could give me a lot of information on what directory did what, where to post VGR, where to post HTML, etc. I kinda had to experiment on my own and as a result we had a few emergency releases to LIVE. I've compiled my notes on FTP and the server locations we use. I'm not sure if they're universal among McKesson systems or not, but I figured hey... all theses notes, surely there's a kernel of wisdom in there somewhere (statistics right?).

So here we go...

Common Lab iForm

Common Lab iForm

So rather than focus on just one thing at a time, I figure I'd show an exert from my common lab iForm. That way you can see many of the scripts and functions I'm using, feel free to take of the code from it you like and feel free to ask any questions you have.

Reader Request - Submit While Using Tabs

I've always wanted to do something like this: "Reader's Requests."  Well, there was a question posted on the "Welcome, Make Yourself at Home" post from Jason (see, now I imagine reading this with my awful Casey Casum impression):

I was wondering how you handle submitting when using a tabbed iform. (one HTML page with multiple tabs via JavaScript)

Example: (abominal pain)
Tab 1 - Lower abd pain - has 3 prechecked selections
tab 2 - Upper abd pain - has 4 prechecked selections.

When you submit, how do you submit the orders on one tab without the orders on the other tab also being submitted?

-Jason

This is an excellent question: as it's phrased, it can't be done; you can't submit some of the items in a web form. However, there are ways to work around these limitations. Let's take a look at a few of them to see what the pro's and con's are.