formsPlayer Developer Support helps developers resolve issues relating to their use of formsPlayer in web applications. Community support is available free of charge to the entire developer community on "best effort" basis. Developers who require clearly defined reaction time targets or want to keep their communication with formsPlayer confidential, can purchase professional support, either on a per-incident basis, or by becoming a Technology Partner. Developers can also purchase our fastStart consultancy if they need help designing or building an application.
The best way to get started is to look at the documentation in the handbooks. In particular, read Programming with formsPlayer and XForms which will guide you through installing formsPlayer and setting up a development environment, which you can then use to work through the Introduction to XForms tutorial. The course shows many key XForms features by way of two useful forms; the first saves links to del.icio.us, whilst the second searches Flickr for images that match a tag.
There are many complete samples available, which will provide plenty of code to look at. The samples are categorised, with tags such as social-bookmarking, mapping, REST, 3D graphics, and more.
Once you start developing your own XForms applications you'll find the forums a useful place to ask questions about development. If you've had any problems installing formsPlayer or setting up your development environment then also take a look at the installation forums. If you have any announcements about XForms or formsPlayer then post them in the News and announcements forum.
Please read the detailed description on using the issue-tracking system, linked to below.
We're always looking for ways to improve and enhance formsPlayer, so if you have ideas for features you'd like to see, we'd love to hear them. Please first search the list of feature requests to see if there is a similar suggestion. Even if someone has already made the same suggestion, feel free to add any further thoughts you have, so that if we do come to implement the feature, we'll fulfill as many requirements as possible. And if you find nothing similar then go ahead and add your request.
We're currently experimenting with using the issue-tracking system here as the only tracking system. We used to use Bugzilla internally, and would enter bugs into the system as they were notified to us on our old Yahoo! Group. But that meant that formsPlayer users would never get to see the progress of a bug, or have any idea which of the bugs in the list were being worked on at any one time. (Or indeed, what bugs were outstanding.) So we decided to take the approach that unless there was a good reason for logging a bug in our internal Bugzilla system, we would always use the public system.
But that does have its problems, since we need people to use the tracking system in a fairly specific way.
If you think you have found a bug in formsPlayer, please first search the bug list to see if someone has already raised the same problem, and then add your comments to the existing bug report. If you find nothing similar then go ahead and add a new issue. Each of the main samples also has its own project page and its own bug tracking area, so if you see a problem with a sample, please post to the specific area.
Assuming that you now definitely have a bug, the best way to use a bug-tracking system is start specific and work out. For example, imagine a bug entitled Submission errors when using HTTPS appear to no longer trigger xforms-submit-error. There is a strong possibility that this bug concerns all submissions, not just those that use HTTPS. And it's also possible that the bug is to do with the incorrect registering of event handlers (i.e., not specifically submission errors), or even that toggle is no longer working correctly (perhaps the handler for a submission error uses toggle and the person who entered the bug is not seeing a case change). These scenarios are unlikely, but it doesn't matter, since as a developer works on the bug, they can refine the title of the bug as necessary, should they find that the issue is not related to submission.
So the job of anyone entering a bug is mainly to give as much information as possible to help reproduce the error.
Now, just say that by the time the bug is fixed, the title has been repeatedly changed (in line with whatever theory the developer was working on at the time) until it ends up being called Toggle fails on Wednesdays; in other words, it turns out that the bug was nothing to do with how it first appeared (submission errors not firing when using HTTPS). And then let's say that the day after this bug is fixed and close, the person who entered the bug discovers in some other form that they are workin on...that once again xforms-submit-error is not firing when using HTTPS!
Is this the same issue as before? Well, obviously it can't be, since the previous issue was "Toggle fails on Wednesdays. It may have started life as an HTTPS-related issue, but that turned out to be wrong, and it needs to be treated as if it always was an issue to do with toggle failing on a particular day of the week.
So it means a new issue has to be entered, and we then start from scratch.
So, to summarise...please enter lots of small issues, focusing on just one problem, and having clear descriptions. There is no need to try to second-guess what the underlying problem is--we'll leave that to the guys with the debugging tools. If we don't do it this way there is no way for developers to get a handle on what's going on, and no way to refer to bugs in an unambiguous way. And the open issues list becomes meaningless.
Professional support is an incident-based paid service, obtained by purchasing support vouchers, each valid for one single support request. Vouchers expire in one year from the purchase date, and you must have at least one unused voucher before we can start tracking your request. If you have none yet, you can either buy a pack of 10 vouchers, or become a Silver Technology Partner, which includes, amongst other things, a pack of 10 vouchers.
Additional terms:
If you would like to find out more about Professional Support then please contact us.