Calculate a subtotal (e.g. order form)

I recently helped a customer create a simple Order form that calculates Subtotals for several line items and a Grand Total. The number of line items is variable since the user may order one or more items.

You can try an example form by clicking here.

It’s a common enough use case yet has some complexities that are easily handled by frevvo. First, you have to create a line item which repeats. In frevvo, simply create a Section for your Line Item, and layout the controls (in the example above, there’s a Drop down named Item for the items, a Money control named P for price, a Quantity control named Q for quantity, and a Money control named S for the subtotal) on a single line using panels. If you aren’t familiar with laying out controls, see this blog post. It contains a short video that shows you how.

Then, you have to create some rules. The first one auto-fills the Price based on the Item chosen. It looks like this:

for (var i = 0; i < Item.value.length; i++) {
  if (Item[i].value == '1000')
    P[i].value = 12.95;
  else if (Item[i].value == '1001')
    P[i].value = 13.65;
  // etc. deleted for brevity
  else
    P[i].value = null;
}

The Items all have codes 1000, 1001 etc. and when a particular item is chosen, the corresponding price is filled in by the rule above. In practice, you may get Items and Prices dynamically from a database. There’s a whole Tutorial on just that topic if you’re interested.

Now that we have our Prices, we need to compute a Subtotal when the user enters a Quantity. That rule looks like this:

for (var i = 0; i < S.value.length; i++) {
  if (Q[i].value > 0) {
    S[i].value = Q[i].value * P[i].value;
  } else {
    S[i].value = 0;
}

Finally, we want to compute a Grand Total, which is the sum of all the Subtotals.

var tot = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < S.value.length; i++) {
  tot = tot + S[i].value;
}
T.value = tot;

Finally, we want to recompute the Grand Total if a line item is removed by the user.

if (ORepeat.itemRemoved) {
  var tot = 0;
  for (var i = 0; i < S.value.length; i++) {
    tot = tot + S[i].value;
  }
  T.value = tot;
}

That’s all there is to it. Try the example form and let us know what you think or if you want to see other examples.

Sharepoint Integration

Nothing like persistent and numerous customer requests to validate a market need for a feature.

It is not that we have not seen this before but, at the end of the day, there are several features in the road map fighting for attention and believe me, the road map is huge! In any case, we are finally committed to provide an easy integration between frevvo and Sharepoint.

Current frevvo customers and prospects are already using or testing frevvo integrated with other back end systems (databases for instance) and would love to bring their Sharepoint instances into the picture. We already provide an Active Directory (LDAP) connector which handles authentication and Single Sign-on and combining that with Sharepoint seems like a great win for users. A sophisticated forms solution that leverages the existing Sharepoint infrastructure and does not dry up the budget is, we believe, highly desirable.

Just as an example, some common use cases we find: create a survey form in minutes using frevvo and share it in the company website. The submissions will update a Sharepoint List and someone internally can generate a report of the answers. A vacation request form can be created in frevvo and when submitted triggers a Sharepoint workflow enabling a manager to approve or deny the request. You get the picture, the possibilities are endless.

The initial version will address what seems to be the most common scenario: create a frevvo form and configure it to post to a Sharepoint List. Frevvo will add a new row to the list when the form is submitted and possibly also save a PDF representation of the form.We will also add the ability to load information back from the list, based on some id, populate the form and update the List entry back. The connector will be able to update resources in any Sharepoint Site or Subsite provided that it has enough permissions to do so.

At this point we are moving full speed with the development and an alpha release is scheduled for the end of Q2/11.

Of course, there are some technical challenges along the way (making sure everything is secure for one) but overall the progress has been great and we are excited about the possibilities.