Form Filling Type IOS app guidelines

Targets iOS
1

Greetings,

Recently i got the iPad Pro 9,7 " version as i have to build an app that is used to fill some forms and in the end to sign that form by several people so while trying to do this i discovered that the whole IOS version is so limited that makes me quit using Xojo for that and start learning Swift even if i hate doing that.

Any idea how to do those type of things ?

  1. The app should be forced to be Portrait only or portrait / Landscape ?
  2. How to design for iPad only.
  3. what is the best way to use the screen to fill the form.
  4. Any way to create reports for it and save it as a pdf ?
  5. Any way to edit word / rtf documents via the app on ipad ? that will help in using tags and replacing those.
  6. I don`t see any check box on the controls , that can be added or not ? and if yes, how ?

Is it worth to do this on an iPad or should i try to find other tablet that has pen capabilities and Cellular connection and move to windblows and doit all there where i have most of the functionalities of a full desktop app.

So the form should be simple, on one part of the page fill the details then the rest of 100 records have Qty in case needed to be modified , check box to check if they did validate that , Comments if any and in the end , date, signature and name.

On the Signature part i was thinking to use a canvas and use the pen to draw that part, then save it as a image and resize it and put it as an image on a document, or something like that .

The second option will be to have it saved as a image in the blob, sync it with a desktop app and do all the processing and document creation and sending mails from the desktop part but that defeats the purpose of the ipad itself.

Any ideas ?

Thanks in advance .

2
  1. On the iPADScreen select the orientation you want to support
  2. On App set none to iPhone Default screen
  3. … you can insert the fields in the view directly or use a scrollview or a mix. It depends on how many fields are required
  4. You can design your data on a canvas and convert it to pdf (there should be a simple example in the forum) otherwise you can send your data to a server and download the document
  5. Word is not automatizable. you can load a rtf file as text and replace the place holders.
  6. There is no checkbox like you used to see on other environment. the checkbox on iOS is the switch control (it’s not Xojo fault)
3

[quote=334634:@Antonio Rinaldi]1) On the iPADScreen select the orientation you want to support
2) On App set none to iPhone Default screen
3) … you can insert the fields in the view directly or use a scrollview or a mix. It depends on how many fields are required
4) You can design your data on a canvas and convert it to pdf (there should be a simple example in the forum) otherwise you can send your data to a server and download the document
5) Word is not automatizable. you can load a rtf file as text and replace the place holders.
6) There is no checkbox like you used to see on other environment. the checkbox on iOS is the switch control (it’s not Xojo fault)[/quote]

Thanks Antonio,

I will try to use canvas to draw in the end the whole form based on the data that i get in the database from the user interface, as for the checkbox part i will try to see maybe i can have some kind of dropdown , by the way, no dropdown as well ? like the combo box.

As for the form conversion so far i did not found anything on the forum and i was thinking to use an external part to do that job but try to have as much as possible in the iPad.

Honestly now that i see a lot of limitations, the device is stable, nice, but kind of useless unless you know swift and it seems that it will take a while until they integrate that pen in code functionality of the apps maybe on the keypad side as well like windblows has so i guess i will have to drop this project and search on the market for a windows tablet and doit there until xojo evolves little bit on the ios part .

Thanks again.

4

Hi,

It is quite easy to create a checkbox using two images and an iOSCanvas control.
Find the images here: https://icons8.com/icon/set/checkbox/ios7

Create a subclass of iOSCanvas, add a Boolean property named “Value”

In the PointerUp event of the Canvas:

me.Value = not me.Value me.invalidate

In the Paint event of the Canvas:

if value then g.Drawimage(checkboxempty, 0, 0) Else g.Drawimage(checkboxfilled, 0, 0) End if

And add a label next to the checkbox.

5

Thanks a lot Jrmie,

you give me hope, i wanted to go Web based but it seems that i cannot use the pen to sign so i come back to the ios again. i`ll see hos i can wrap the whole part and maybe try to save the whole canvas into a picture and then print it as pdf on another machine and dispatch it from there to the customer .

Any ideas for pdf saving on ios will be great.

Thanks again .

6

I found this in relates to the pdf part, any idea how to transform this in Xojo ? Apple Developer Docs

7

The solution I currently use for PDF is to have wkhtmltopdf or phantom.js installed on a web server.

Within the iOS app, I send HTML to the server at a special endpoint, and it sends back the a PDF generated from the HTML.
This solution doesn’t work offline, but it has the advantage to take almost any HTML input and produces a clean PDF.

8

Here is a Checkbox custom control for Xojo iOS
http://www.jeremieleroy.com/wpg/bin/iOSCheckbox_v1.0.zip