Development Update - Contact Management

Our first focus was building contact management for CRM. We had the major functionality already in our Groups application. We ported that over from groups (which is in CakePHP), taking advantage of single table inheritance in rails (which CakePHP doesn’t support). This allowed for less code for contacts in Rails than we had before and made pagination much easier.

We are using Behavior to keep as much javascript out of the views as possible (lessons learned from previous apps).

For example, in the screenshot below we are using default labels “Address”, “City”, “State”, “Zip” to provide a hint to the user. If they start typing in the field the label goes away. If they leave the field but don’t enter anything the label comes back. Easy effect, but requires a bit of javascript. Using Behavior, all the code is outside of the page. The form in this case is very clean.. just the input fields. And if you want to add a new address, an ajax call places a new address form below this one, the rules are reapplied and you will see default labels there as well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 7:32 am and is filed under development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.