Playing with Zoho Creator
Posted on November 4, 2007
4 Comments
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I was experimenting with Zoho Creator a bit. I spent a couple hours with it last night and several more today and thought I’d take a moment to share.
First off, let me preface all this with: Zoho Creator is not the answer I’m looking for — at least not for the particular problem I’m trying to solve (see more below). However, there are great odds that I’ll be back to it for other projects, it is very slick and quite a bit more capable than I had suspected.
What is it? Zoho Creator is an online database application and an online application builder. It is all web based and very powerful. What follows is a bit of an overview of what I managed to put together today.
The Challenge
As part of my current health kick, I track all food I consume along with all the calories burnt exercising at the gym. My goal is to come up with a simple way to enter foods, track meals and generally have access to all my data from a desktop, laptop or my pocket PC phone.
The Good
I started by creating a couple items that I would traditionally call tables, but Zoho Creator (ZC from this point forward) calls Forms. First one I created is called “Foods”, this is where the data entry happens:
Most of that is pretty straight-forward, but the “Points” field is a derived (or calculated) field. I used a bit of the Deluge scripting code to add some “On Success” code that is executed when a record is saved.
Ah, but there’s a wrinkle that I just recalled: the value for “Fiber” can’t exceed 4. I cheated and handled that with a bit of form validation code:
Cheesy, but it serves the purpose. Oh, I also hide the “points” field when doing data entry. Since it is calculated, no need to look at it when entering data.
All that generates a nice little data entry form:
As you examine the left sidebar, you’ll also see the Food Log form (where meals are tracked) and a few reports that I was experimenting with.
The Foods List report took about 3 minutes to create — reports are easy. Here’s mine, showing the food items I entered today while playing around with the above Foods data entry form:
Seriously, zero coding there, just checked some boxes and dragged columns to set order.
The Food Log is where I spent most of my time. This is where food items are matched to meals for a given date. It doesn’t look like much, but there’s some cool stuff going on here.
The first field is a date. By making this a “date type” field, the nifty little date picker is automagically added. I have one line of code in the form’s On Load event to pre-populate that field with the current date.
Next is the Meal field. This is your basic dropdown menu with a preset list of meals defined.
Side Note: ZC automatically validates fields like to ensure something was actually selected if it is marked as a required field. Pretty slick.
The next item is the Food Item dropdown. Initially I made this very hard and wrote a bunch of script code to populate it with items from my Foods form. Then I realized there was an easier way. I went with a “lookup field” type and got a dialog like this:
That negated about an hours worth of trial-and-error with code! Just select where to import from and check the box to alphabetize. Nice!
Now I had a head scratcher. I know what food I want, but I need to update the values associated with it depending on quantity size (that’s the “Multiplier” field on the form). I opted to write a bit of script to update those fields whenever the Food Item or Multiplier fields would change.
I have very similar code on the Multiplier field as well. While I’m sure that there are more elegant ways to do this, it actually works quite well.
The Bad
It was while trying to put together a report to be used to sum up each day’s totals that I ran into my deal-breaker. In short: I can’t do that.
Turns out that there is currently no “Group By” functionality. I can’t generate a report that just totals up calories by day. I have to list out all the line items in daily reports. Blech.
I found a work-around called “Poor Man’s Group-By“, but it’s just not practical for what I’m after. I’ve also seen references and requests for this in the support forums. It’s been “coming soon” now for a few months. Hopefully it really is coming soon.
I hit a few other snags along the way, but none were really deal breakers like the one above. The script editor got a bit wonky on me from time to time and when editing fields their data-type would sometimes mysteriously change from Decimal to Numeric type but I could generally handle, catch or work-around stuff like that. Hell, it’s free, I can be patient!
I would like to see in the future, the ability to style things a bit. I’d like to be able to control the displayed length of fields, set colors, fonts — and ideally, I’d like to work up a mobile style as well. Hopefully stuff like that is in the cards for the future.
Generally Thumbs Up
I realize this turned out to be rather long, but hopefully it might be of value to someone, someday.
If you need to build an online application, ZC seems to be the way to go. It doesn’t take a lot of coding to do the basics, and when you move past the basics the scripting is pretty easy to wrap your head around
I was impressed with how much I managed to get done in just a few hours with no prior experience with it. Sometimes it seems just like using MS Access and sometimes that mind-set can be a hindrance… but I definitely feel it’s a very viable option for online apps.
Tags: access, database, web-developer, zoho, zoho-creator
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4 Responses to “Playing with Zoho Creator”
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Chris,
Thanks for publishing such a detailed retrospective on building your app. I think it’s the best one I’ve seen to date.
The lack of GROUP BY is definitely a bummer; for absolute control over look and feel there is of course the recently announced ZC API, which I have n’t found time to spend much time with yet but looks promising.
Also and completely incidentally, given the subject of your development I assume you already checked out calorie-count.com and didn’t like it for some reason?
Thanks for taking time to try out Zoho Creator and posting your experience. We agree that ‘Group by’ is a very important feature that is missing now. We will start working on this feature very soon. We will also be providing more options to customize colors and fonts. Will update you once the feature is ready.
Suganya.
@Pete - Thanks for the kind words.
I’ve found an odd work-around for the missing GROUP BY for now… At the end of the day, I filter my detailed view by date. I also have totals on that view so I just move the totals over to my old spreadsheet. Silly, but it works for now. And this way I get to continue using my ZC app.
@Suganya - thanks for dropping by! When you folks roll out GROUP BY a lot of people are going to be very happy
ZC is a great product, I look forward to watching it evolve.